Astronomers are using 100 newly found supermassive black holes as a laboratory for extreme physics experiments.
These black holes are nicknamed ‘blazars’ because they’re shooting explosive jets of matter and radiation directly at Earth. The intense environments of black holes are perfect to check physics to its limit, one among the study authors said in an announcement.
“They supply us with opportunities to check theories of relativity, to raised understand how particles behave at high energies, to check potential sources of cosmic rays that arrive here on Earth, and to check the evolution and formation of supermassive black holes and their jets,” Abe Falcon, leader of the high energy astrophysics group at Penn State, said in a May 10 statement (opens in recent tab).
Blazars launch when a few of the matter surrounding a supermassive black hole doesn’t fall to its surface, but as an alternative channels to the black hole’s poles at speeds approaching that of sunshine. Because jet activity is directly linked to how supermassive black holes gather mass, unveiling this phenomenon could show how these cosmic titans grow to masses such as thousands and thousands and even billions of times that of the sun.
“Since the jet of a blazar is pointed directly at us, we are able to see them from much farther away than other black hole systems, much like how a flashlight appears brightest while you’re looking directly at it,” research lead creator and Penn State astronomy and astrophysics graduate student, Stephen Kerby, said in the identical statement. “Blazars are exciting to check because their properties allow us to reply questions on supermassive black holes throughout the universe.”
The team found the brand new blazars while taking a look at unclassified high-energy cosmic emissions with telescopes. These newly identified blazars are dim compared to typical examples of those powerful cosmic objects, which may often outshine the combined light from every star within the galaxy that hosts them. The dimmer blazers allowed the team to check a controversial theory surrounding blazar emissions, called the ‘blazar sequence.’
(opens in recent tab)
Blazars emit light across all the electromagnetic spectrum, starting from low-energy light like radio waves right through to extremely energetic gamma rays. The spectrum of sunshine from blazars tends to peak at two specific wavelengths, nonetheless: in gamma-ray wavelengths, and in a variety of lower-energy wavelengths. (The precise wavelength of those peaks varies from blazar to blazar and might change over time.)
The blazar sequence theory predicts that the lower-energy peak for vivid blazars might be more towards the red (or lower-energy end) of the electromagnetic spectrum than the identical peak for dimmer blazars. Observations to substantiate the idea have been hard to acquire, nonetheless.
“With our currently operating telescopes, it’s actually very difficult to detect and classify the lower-energy peaked — red — blazars which might be also dim, whereas it is way easier to search out these blazars when their peaks are at higher energies or after they are vivid,” Falcone said.
The newer research, against this, goals to start out “exploring the blazar sequence by delving deeper into lower luminosities of each the low-energy and high-energy peaked blazars,” he added.
(opens in recent tab)
The team checked out a catalog of gamma-ray sources detected by the Fermi Large Area Telescope, finding high-energy emissions that hadn’t yet been linked with a low-energy peak from the identical source. For every blazar seen in gamma rays, the astronomers found a counterpart emission in X-rays, ultraviolet light, or visible light detected by the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. Getting the Swift data from the archive helped the team characterize the sunshine from 106 recent dim blazars.
“The Swift telescope observations allowed us to pinpoint the positions of those blazars with far more precision than with the Fermi data alone,” Kerby explained. “Pulling together all this emission data, combined with two recent technical approaches, helped us discover where within the electromagnetic spectrum the low-energy peak occurs for every of the blazars.”
Helping with the search was machine learning (a type of artificial intelligence) and physical modeling, each confirming that the sample of dim blazars generally peaks within the blue, higher-energy light.
Going forward, the team will attempt using this dataset to make predictions in regards to the blazars which might be still too dim for astronomers to detect directly.
“There are still a thousand Fermi unassociated sources for which we now have found no X-ray counterpart, and it’s a reasonably secure assumption that lots of those sources are also blazars which might be just too dim within the X-rays for us to detect,” Kerby said.
This future study could allow the team to further test the blazar sequence, too. The brand new work could also show the strength of a blazar jet’s magnetic field, and how briskly the charged particles inside it are moving, Kerby said.
“It is important to all the time work to expand our datasets to achieve dimmer and dimmer sources, since it makes our theories more complete and fewer vulnerable to failures from unexpected biases,” the graduate student said. “I’m excited for brand spanking new telescopes to probe even dimmer blazars in the long run.”
The team’s research has been accepted for publication within the Astrophysical Journal and was published on the preprint server arXiv (opens in recent tab) on May 3.