Black Holes and X-ray Pulses

The "missing-link" between giant and small black holes has been found


Black hole emitting an X-ray pulse


Researchers from Durham University discovered that an enormous black hole located 500 million light years away from Earth emits a strong X-ray pulse.




They stumbled upon the phenomenon as they were scouring about the
middle of a galaxy called REJ1034+396, and it looks like the pulse is
attributed to the gas around the black
hole which is rapidly aspired with great force inside it. The
phenomenon is not a new one, since scientists have noticed it before,
but not in a black hole of this magnitude. They used to believe that this pulse emission was only manifested by small black
holes, so the current research is the first one to find a pulse
generated by a hole this big. This will shed a new light on the strange
event, since most of the galaxies are believed to contain a giant-sized
black hole at their core, our own Milky Way included.




It will also aid people who study black holes to "spot" them more easily due to the X-rays emitted by the gas, which turns extremely hot before it gets sucked in for good. Helped by the powerful European X-ray satellite XMM-Newton, researchers discovered that the frequency of the X-ray pulse depends on the size of the black hole. Further explanations were given by Durham University's Dr. Marek Gierlinski from the Department of Physics.




He stated that "Such signals are a well known feature of smaller black
holes in our Galaxy when gas is pulled from a companion star. The
really interesting thing is that we have now established a link between
these light-weight black
holes and those millions of times as heavy as our Sun. Scientists have
been looking for such behavior for the past 20 years and our discovery
helps us begin to understand more about the activity around such black
holes as they grow." He hopes that in the future he and his team will
manage to figure out why this phenomenon only happens for some black holes but not for all of them.