SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Galaxy Punches Through Neighbor to Spawn Giant Ring of Black Holes
A giant ring of black holes has been discovered 300 million light-years away, offering new clues about what happens when galaxies collide. [...] The observed ring of black holes or neutron stars is believed to be the result of a galaxy collision. The galaxies were likely drawn together by gravity, and the gravitational force from one galaxy created waves in the gas surrounding its neighbor, which, in this case, is AM 0644. The ripples would have then caused the gas to expand or clump together in denser areas, triggering the birth of new stars.
"The most massive of these fledgling stars will lead short lives — in cosmic terms — of millions of years," representatives from the Chandra X-ray Observatory said in a statement. "After that, their nuclear fuel is spent, and the stars explode as supernovas, leaving behind either black holes with masses typically between about five to twenty times that of the sun, or neutron stars with a mass approximately equal to that of the sun." The black holes or neutron stars have close cosmic companions from which they siphon gas. This gas falls inward and is heated by friction, creating the bright X-rays detected by Chandra, according to the statement.
Also at Bad Astronomy.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday September 12 2018, @01:59PM (2 children)
So, high speed collision you say.
+ Insightful on this one.
Even though, to have high speed/high temp accretion with a lowish mass blackhole - just where from the energy is coming? The heating must happen in a narrow region close to the horizon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @02:29PM (1 child)
It comes from the same place that an asteroid falling to the earth gets its energy: gravitational potential energy. An object falling into a black hole will experience fantastic stresses as the gravitational potential is much higher at one end than the other, stretching it into spaghetti. Matter falling into the black hole forms an accretion disk, gets compressed and heated by the gravity, and radiates as a result. Since the matter will get fantastically hot in the process it'll become a superheated plasma, and naturally, charged particles accelerated by the black hole's gravity will also radiate in various ways (synchrotron radiation, brehmsstrahlung, etc.).
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @02:51PM
Is this happening on an atomic scale? And if you say "yes", then how close to the event horizon is atomic deformation beginning?