Astronomers have discovered a distinctly supermassive black hole snack, strolling through the Milky Way 600 million light-years away, with the black hole at its core larger.
The event, known as AT2024TVD, was first discovered by the Zwicky Transient facility of the Palomar Observatory and later confirmed by Powerhouse Space Telescopes, including Hubble and Chandra, which helped to conduct zero at the cosmic crime scene. Surprisingly, responsible black holes are not the center of supermassive black holes. Instead, it is a light-year 2600 years from the center of the Milky Way, with a great distance on paper, but it is actually only one tenth of the way between our Sun and Sagittarius A*, a black hole in the center of the Milky Way.
When the gravity of the black hole pulls the star so violently, a tidal destruction event (TDE) occurs that huge balls of gas stretching, chopping and rotating around the black hole in a pleasant process called pasta. The brief burst of energy during the activity is Gargantuan, even comparable to the supernova (the explosive death of giant stars). The burst of visible light can also be seen in the electromagnetic spectrum, making TDE a valuable resource for discovering black holes that might otherwise be too quiet or hidden to detect, such as the nearest rogue object.
What makes AT2024TVD unique is that it is the first offset TDE discovered by optical investigations, according to the forthcoming paper in the Astrophysics Diary, which was also published on Preprint Server Arxiv. This achievement shows that a rogue black hole can be discovered as long as an unfortunate object sacrifices its own huge object to reveal it – in the darkness and in the darkness as it moves through the universe.
“Tidal damage events have great hope for illuminating the existence of huge black holes that we would otherwise not detect,” a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the ZTF team, said in a NASA release. “Theorists have predicted that there must be a large number of black holes far from the center of the galaxy, but now we can use TDE to find them.”
The team has several ideas on how the rogue black hole will eventually offset the Milky Way and is so close to its core supermass black hole. (The mass of Rogue Black Hole is estimated to be about 1 million solar energy, at least ten times smaller than the black hole in the center of the Milky Way.) One option is that the black hole is the center of a smaller galaxy covered by a larger galaxy, which now flows out only in larger galaxies. Another possibility is that black holes were once the weakest link in the three-body system and were pushed out by larger objects. In other words, two larger black holes may lurk on the core of the Milky Way, while the rogue black holes were driven out for thousands of light years.
“If the black hole has triple interactions with the other two black holes in the core of the Milky Way, it can still keep in touch with the Milky Way and bypass the central region in the central region,” said Yuhan Yao, a UC Berkeley researcher and lead author of the study. But for the moment, the team is not sure whether to push the black hole out or drag it into it by a larger black hole.
With the arrival of future instruments such as the Vera Rubin Observatory and the Roman Space Telescope, astronomers hope this is just the beginning of a completely new category of discovery. Because if there is anything more disturbing than a black hole swallowing a star, it is the idea that hungry objects are just drifting in space in unexpected places.
