14 DAY TRIAL // 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.