Astronomers have discovered rapidly swinging jets coming from a black hole almost 8000 light-years from Earth.<\/p>\n
Published today in the journal Nature<\/em>, the research shows jets from V404 Cygni\u2019s black hole behaving in a way never seen before on such short timescales.<\/p>\n The jets appear to be rapidly rotating with high-speed clouds of plasma\u2014potentially just minutes apart\u2014shooting out of the black hole in different directions.<\/p>\n Lead author Associate Professor James Miller-Jones, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), said black holes are some of the most extreme objects in the Universe.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is one of the most extraordinary black hole systems I\u2019ve ever come across,\u201d Associate Professor Miller-Jones said.<\/p>\n \u201cLike many black holes, it\u2019s feeding on a nearby star, pulling gas away from the star and forming a disk of material that encircles the black hole and spirals towards it under gravity.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s different in V404 Cygni is that we think the disk of material and the black hole are misaligned.<\/p>\n \u201cThis appears to be causing the inner part of the disk to wobble like a spinning top and fire jets out in different directions as it changes orientation.\u201d<\/p>\n V404 Cygni was first identified as a black hole in 1989 when it released a big outburst of jets and radiation.<\/p>\n Astronomers looking at archival photographic plates then found previous outbursts in observations from 1938 and 1956.<\/p>\n Associate Professor Miller-Jones said that when V404 Cygni experienced another very bright outburst in 2015, lasting for two weeks, telescopes around the world tuned in to study what was going on.<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody jumped on the outburst with whatever telescopes they could throw at it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cSo we have this amazing observational coverage.\u201d<\/p>\n When Associate Professor Miller-Jones and his team studied the black hole, they saw its jets behaving in a way never seen before.<\/p>\n Where jets are usually thought to shoot straight out from the poles of black holes, these jets were shooting out in different directions at different times.<\/p>\n And they were changing direction very quickly\u2014over no more than a couple of hours.<\/p>\n Associate Professor Miller-Jones said the change in the movement of the jets was because of the accretion disk\u2014the rotating disk of matter around a black hole.<\/p>\n He said V404 Cygni\u2019s accretion disk is 10 million kilometres wide, and the inner few thousand kilometres was puffed up and wobbling during the bright outburst.<\/p>\n \u201cThe inner part of the accretion disk was precessing and effectively pulling the jets around with it,\u201d Associate Professor Miller-Jones said.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can think of it like the wobble of a spinning top as it slows down\u2014only in this case, the wobble is caused by Einstein\u2019s theory of general relativity.\u201d<\/p>\n The research used observations from the Very Long Baseline Array, a continent-sized radio telescope made up of 10 dishes across the United States, from the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean to Hawaii.<\/p>\n Co-author Alex Tetarenko\u2014a recent PhD graduate from the University of Alberta and currently an East Asian Observatory Fellow working in Hawaii\u2014said the speed the jets were changing direction meant the scientists had to use a very different approach to most radio observations.<\/p>\n \u201cTypically, radio telescopes produce a single image from several hours of observation,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cBut these jets were changing so fast that in a four-hour image we just saw a blur.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was like trying to take a picture of a waterfall with a one-second shutter speed.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead, the researchers produced 103 individual images, each about 70 seconds long, and joined them together into a movie.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was only by doing this that we were able to see these changes over a very short time period,\u201d Dr Tetarenko said.<\/p>\n Study co-author Dr Gemma Anderson, who is also based at ICRAR\u2019s Curtin University node, said the wobble of the inner accretion disk could happen in other extreme events in the Universe too.<\/p>\n \u201cAnytime you get a misalignment between the spin of a black hole and the material falling in, you would expect to see this when a black hole starts feeding very rapidly,\u201d Dr Anderson said.<\/p>\n \u201cThat could include a whole bunch of other bright, explosive events in the Universe, such as supermassive black holes feeding very quickly or tidal disruption events, when a black hole shreds a star.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Astronomers have discovered rapidly swinging jets coming from a black hole almost 8000 light-years from Earth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4307,"featured_media":11578,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"_oasis_task_priority":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_research-areas":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,40],"tags":[],"research-areas":[],"class_list":["post-19244","media-release","type-media-release","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus-and-global-community","category-research","category-technology"],"acf":{"post_options":{"":null,"additional_content":{"title":"","content":"","image":false},"related_courses":false,"credits":{"author":"","photographer":"","media":false},"display_author":true,"banner":{"image":false}}},"featured_image":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/4_V404-Cygni-1024x576-1-1000x500.jpg","author_meta":{"first_name":"Lucien","last_name":"Wilkinson","display_name":"Lucien 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