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posted by chromas on Monday June 15 2020, @01:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the /dev/watchdog0 dept.

The first confirmed heartbeat of a supermassive black hole is still going strong more than ten years after first being observed.

X-ray satellite observations spotted the repeated beat after its signal had been blocked by our Sun for a number of years.

[...] The black hole's heartbeat was first detected in 2007 at the centre of a galaxy called RE J1034+396 which is approximately 600 million light years from Earth.

The signal from this galactic giant repeated every hour and this behaviour was seen in several snapshots taken before satellite observations were blocked by our Sun in 2011.

In 2018 the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray satellite was able to finally re-observe the black hole and to scientists' amazement the same repeated heartbeat could still be seen.

Matter falling on to a supermassive black hole as it feeds from the accretion disc of material surrounding it releases an enormous amount of power from a comparatively tiny region of space, but this is rarely seen as a specific repeatable pattern like a heartbeat.

The time between beats can tell us about the size and structure of the matter close to the black hole's event horizon.

Journal Reference:

Martin Ward, Chris Done, Chichuan Jin. Reobserving the NLS1 galaxy RE J1034 396 – I. The long-term, recurrent X-ray QPO with a high significance. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2020; 495 (4): 3538 DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staa1356


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2020, @03:32AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2020, @03:32AM (#1008000)

    "...after its signal had been blocked by our Sun for a number of years"

    That makes no sense. How can the sun block something out for years? Since our sun moves in the sky, from our POV, 0.5 degrees each day, any object is blocked by it's overpowering light will move enough outside it's glow in a couple of months to be visible again.
    If someone can explain what the article means by "before satellite observations were blocked by our Sun in 2011", I'd be much obliged.

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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday June 15 2020, @07:30AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday June 15 2020, @07:30AM (#1008038) Journal

    An issue of The Sun [wikipedia.org] somehow got into space, where it ended up covering the satellite's instruments. It took years to get it off the satellite. :-)

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by surjeon on Monday June 15 2020, @09:26AM

    by surjeon (9954) on Monday June 15 2020, @09:26AM (#1008064)

    It seems to have something to do with how long the object was continuously viewable for within an orbit of the satellite. The paper said observation times had increased to >70 ks (~20 hours) in 2018, whereas it wasn't before that.

    It looks like the data comes from a survey that the satellite does rather than just from pointing the telescope straight at the source, so maybe it has to do with how the orbit/pointing of the satellite is adapted to deal with where exactly the sun's path is against the background stars? I couldn't actually see any reference to it being blocked by the sun.