Black Hole Explosions Last Billions of Years

A group of astrophysicists is now proposing that black holes may create vast amounts of radiation as they explode. These amounts may be entirely proportional with their mass, and the leftovers would be released into the Universe as their precursor black holes explode.

These proposals are based on results collected in 2009 by the NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory, one of the four Great Observatory spacecraft. The satellite was able to capture data on a cosmic ghost, the remnants of a blown up supermassive black hole.

According to studies conducted at the time, the dark behemoth exploded with the energy of a billion supernova events, which are themselves renowned for the energy they unleash in the Universe.

The object Chandra found is called HDF 130, and is located an estimated 10 billion light-years away from Earth. What this implies is that it existed at a time when the Cosmos was just a fraction of its current age, or some 3 billion years after the Big Bang.

“We'd seen this fuzzy object a few years ago, but didn't realize until now that we were seeing a ghost. It's not out there to haunt us, rather it's telling us something – in this case what was happening in this galaxy billions of year ago,” University of Cambridge astronomer Andy Fabian explains.

The reason why only X-ray radiations remain, the expert explains, is that the vast radio jets which accompanied the tremendous explosions have long since lost their energy, disappearing into the background. But X-rays are more energetic, and were therefore able to persist for longer.

“This ghost tells us about the black hole's eruption long after it has died. This means we don't have to catch the black holes in the act to witness the big impact they have,” Cambridge expert and study coauthor Scott Chapman adds, quoted by Daily Galaxy.

What this research suggests is that the X-ray sky should contain many such ghosts, produced by black holes that exploded billions of years ago. Now that astrophysicists know what they are looking for, we may soon have a preliminary map of such X-ray sources.

“Even after the ghost disappears, most of the energy from the black hole's eruption remains. Because they're so powerful, these eruptions can have profound effects lasting for billions of years,” Fabian concludes.