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Researchers observe a mysterious object being swallowed up by a black hole

2023-03-05T09:44:40.308Z


The mysterious object X7 is close to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way - and is likely to be devoured soon.


The mysterious object X7 is close to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way - and is likely to be devoured soon.

Los Angeles - At the center of the Milky Way is a supermassive black hole that was first imaged by a research group last year.

However, the black hole called Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) has been known since the 1970s.

For about 20 years, researchers have been observing an elongated object called X7 near the supermassive black hole and have been trying to figure out what it is.

Now a group of astronomers from the UCLA Galactic Center Group has evaluated the observation data of the past 20 years and makes a suggestion as to what it could be: The mysterious object, which comes very close to the black hole, could be a cloud of dust and be gas that was formed when two stars collided.

The study was published in

The Astrophysical Journal

.

Object X7 being elongated by black hole

Over time, the shape of the unusual object X7 has changed, says Anna Ciurlo of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the study's lead author.

"No other property in this region has shown such extreme development," Ciurlo said in a statement.

"It started out in comet form and it was thought that it might have been given its shape by stellar winds or black hole particle jets."

However, over the 20 years that the object has been observed, it has become increasingly elongated.

"Something must have set this cloud on its special path and in its special direction," Ciurlo suspects.

X7 has a mass of about 50 Earths, moves at a speed of about four million kilometers per hour and takes about 170 years to orbit the black hole.

Mysterious object X7 will soon be swallowed up by the black hole

However, scientists are not sure if X7 will make another full orbit: the research team assumes that X7 will make its closest approach to Sagittarius A* around 2036 and will then inevitably be attracted to the black hole and ultimately swallowed up.

"We expect that the strong tidal forces exerted by the black hole will eventually tear X7 apart before it completes even one orbit," explains Mark Morris, who worked on the study.

In their study, the research group describes how X7 could have originated.

"One possibility is that gas and dust were ejected at the moment of a star merger," says Ciurlo.

"The ejected gas may have produced X7-like objects." Star mergers are not uncommon in the vicinity of a black hole.

"It's a very chaotic process: the stars orbit each other, get closer, merge, and the new star is hidden in a cloud of dust and gas," explains Ciurlo.

"X7 could be dust and gas being ejected from a merged star that's still out there somewhere."

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The Keck telescope captured these images of X7 near the black hole Sagittarius A*.

© A. Ciurlo et al./UCLA GCOI/WM Keck Observatory

The research team plans to continue observing X7 using the Keck telescope and analyze in detail what happens to the object as it gets closer to the black hole.

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Another research team has discovered evidence of a black hole that is "sleeping."

Source: merkur

All news articles on 2023-03-05

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