A new study sheds light on the bright outbursts of radiation that are created when a star is destroyed by a supermassive black hole. The outbursts do not necessarily form in the close vicinity of the black hole, but are created by tidal shocks that occur when gas from the destroyed star hits itself while circling the black hole.
The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded a Synergy Grant, named “BlackHolistic”, of 14 million Euro to a team of Dutch, British, Finnish, and Namibian astronomers to make colour movies of black holes. Researchers from the University of Turku are involved in international collaboration.
Some of the brightest objects in the sky are called blazars. They consist of a supermassive black hole feeding off material swirling around it in a disk, which can create two powerful jets perpendicular to the disk on each side. A blazar is especially bright because one of its jets of high-speed particles points straight at Earth. For decades, scientists have wondered: How do particles in these jets get accelerated to such high energies?
The research conducted at the Finnish Centre for Astronomy with ESO (FINCA) focuses on three large main fields of astronomy.
For the first time, astrophysicists have localised the source of a cosmic neutrino originated outside of the Milky Way. With high probability, the neutrino comes from a blazar, an active black hole at the centre of a distant galaxy in the Orion constellation. The scientists reached this interesting finding by combining a neutrino signal from IceCube with measurements from the Fermi-LAT and MAGIC telescopes as well as other instruments. This multi-messenger observation could also provide a clue to an unsolved mystery: the origin of cosmic rays.