Post by swamprat on Feb 23, 2012 19:13:46 GMT -6
Cosmic hurricane: black hole has 20 million MPH winds
Published February 23, 2012
Space.com
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This artist's impression shows the strong gravity of the black hole, on the left, pulling gas away from a companion star on the right. This gas forms a disk of hot gas around the black hole, and the wind is driven off this disk at 20 million mph. (NASA/CXC/M.Weiss)
Scientists have measured the fastest winds yet observed from a stellar-mass black hole, shedding light on the behavior of these curious cosmic objects.
The winds, clocked by astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, are racing through space at 20 million mph (32 million kph), or about 3 percent the speed of light. That's nearly 10 times faster than had ever been seen from a stellar-mass black hole, researchers said.
IGR J17091 is a binary system in which a sun-like star orbits a black hole. It's found in the central bulge of our Milky Way galaxy, about 28,000 light-years from Earth.
IGR J17091's wind matches some of the fastest generated by supermassive black holes, which are millions or billions of times more massive. Supermassive black holes are thought to reside at the heart of most if not all active galaxies, including our own Milky Way.
Another surprising finding from the new study is that the wind, which comes from a disk of gas surrounding the black hole, may be blasting more material into space than the black hole is capturing.
"Contrary to the popular perception of black holes pulling in all of the material that gets close, we estimate up to 95 percent of the matter in the disk around IGR J17091 is expelled by the wind," King said.
Copyright 2012 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/02/23/cosmic-hurricane-black-hole-has-20-million-mph-winds/?intcmp=features
Published February 23, 2012
Space.com
•
This artist's impression shows the strong gravity of the black hole, on the left, pulling gas away from a companion star on the right. This gas forms a disk of hot gas around the black hole, and the wind is driven off this disk at 20 million mph. (NASA/CXC/M.Weiss)
Scientists have measured the fastest winds yet observed from a stellar-mass black hole, shedding light on the behavior of these curious cosmic objects.
The winds, clocked by astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, are racing through space at 20 million mph (32 million kph), or about 3 percent the speed of light. That's nearly 10 times faster than had ever been seen from a stellar-mass black hole, researchers said.
IGR J17091 is a binary system in which a sun-like star orbits a black hole. It's found in the central bulge of our Milky Way galaxy, about 28,000 light-years from Earth.
IGR J17091's wind matches some of the fastest generated by supermassive black holes, which are millions or billions of times more massive. Supermassive black holes are thought to reside at the heart of most if not all active galaxies, including our own Milky Way.
Another surprising finding from the new study is that the wind, which comes from a disk of gas surrounding the black hole, may be blasting more material into space than the black hole is capturing.
"Contrary to the popular perception of black holes pulling in all of the material that gets close, we estimate up to 95 percent of the matter in the disk around IGR J17091 is expelled by the wind," King said.
Copyright 2012 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/02/23/cosmic-hurricane-black-hole-has-20-million-mph-winds/?intcmp=features