Black Holes Spotted-Eating Stars So Quick Video, That The Winds Reach 1 Quarter Of The Speed Of Light

We are used to view of black holes as cosmic plugholes, sucking in all the material that surrounds them, but their appetite in fact sometimes leads them to spit out what they were annoying to eat. Rarely have we seen it as quick as this, though.

In a finding published in Nature, 2 stellar mass (star-sized) black holes have been observed devour their companion stars so fast that the process throws a few of the material away from the black hole at roughly a quarter of the speed of light. While strong outflows have been observed in supermassive black holes, this has never been experiential in stellar mass objects like these.

The finding was possible thanks to the European Space Agency’s (ESA) XMM-Newton space observatory, which study the sky in X-rays. The two black holes are considerably brighter than other X-ray-emitting objects and, for this cause; they earn the nickname ultra-luminous X-ray sources.

The X-rays are shaped by the material falling onto the black holes. Due to friction, this material is excited up and it starts emit a lot of light, including a lot of X-rays. For the black holes NGC 1313 X-1 and NGC 5408 X-1, which are respectively 12 and 15 million light-years from us, the radiation stress from the hot gas generates the high-speed winds observed.

“This is the first time we’ve seen winds stream away from ultra-luminous X-ray sources,” said Dr. Ciro Pinto from Cambridge’s organization of Astronomy, the paper’s lead author, in a statement. “And the very high speed of these outflows is telling us something about the life of the compact objects in these sources, which are anxiously devouring matter.”

But the hunger of these black holes is mysterious, as it appears to be an infringement of classical physics. The radiation pressure the gas experiences from being so hot should conquer the gravity that pulls it towards the black holes, sense it is not eaten, but that is not the case, representative that these black holes might be larger than we thought. 

Heavier and rarer black holes, like the ones that shaped the LIGO gravitational wave discovery, might be responsible, and even highly magnetized neutron stars might create a similar X-ray signature in the sky.

The team is still going through the XMM-Newton archive in the hope of finding more of these types of objects, and they are planning future follow-up observation of sources with radio and optical telescopes.

“With a broader example of sources and multi-wavelength observations, we hope to lastly uncover the physical nature of these powerful, peculiar matter,” said-Pinto.