 SpaceRef Image Gallery |
As if black holes weren’t menacing enough, astronomers
now have observational evidence that at least some of them
spin about like whirlpools, wrapping up the fabric of space
with them.
Dr. Tod Strohmayer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center,
Greenbelt, MD, has studied one such black hole system with
NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer and found unique patterns
in the X-ray radiation that have previously only been seen in
spinning neutron stars. With these new parameters, he could
verify that a black hole, like a neutron star, can spin.
The observation also challenges theories about neutron star
radiation. Strohmayer presents his findings today at the
American Physical Society Spring Meeting in Washington, D.C.
Computer animation illustrating the discovery will be
broadcast on NASA TV at noon EDT today.
“Almost every kind of object in space spins, such as planets,
stars, and galaxies,” said Strohmayer. “With black holes, it’s
much harder to directly see that they are spinning, because
they don’t have a solid surface that you can watch spin
around. We can, however, see the light emitted from matter
plunging into the black hole. The matter whips frantically
around the black hole before it is lost forever.”
The black hole that Strohmayer observed is the stellar
variety, which is formed from a collapsed star. When stars at
least 10 times more massive than our Sun exhaust their fuel
supply, they no longer have the energy to support their
tremendous bulk. These stars explode their outer shell of gas
in an event called a supernova.
The remaining bulk, still several times more massive than the
Sun, collapses into a single point of infinite density, called
a singularity. Neutron stars form through a similar process,
only from a slightly less massive star in which the inner core
collapses into a dense chunk as heavy as the Sun yet only 10
miles across.
The Rossi Explorer, launched December 1995, has long recorded
a certain type of X-ray flickering from neutron stars called
quasiperiodic oscillations, or QPOs, caused by hot gas dancing
around the neutron star in a lively orbit. Astronomers think
that these oscillations are produced by motions of matter very
near the innermost stable orbit — the closest orbit a blob of
gas can maintain before falling into the central object.
Strohmayer’s target was GRO J1655-40, a microquasar 10,000
light years from Earth. A microquasar is a specific type of
black hole with jets of high-speed particles shooting
perpendicularly from the plane of matter that orbits it.
Strohmayer observed two QPOs, a previously detected one at
about 300 Hertz (Hz) and a newly detected one at 450 Hz. (A
hertz is a unit of frequency equal to one cycle per second.)
The black hole mass has been established at seven times the
mass of our Sun from earlier optical observations of GRO
J1655-40. “A spinning black hole modifies the fabric of space
near it,” said Strohmayer. “The spinning allows matter to
orbit at a closer distance than if it were not spinning, and
the closer matter can get the faster it can orbit. For GRO
J1655-40 we can now say that the only way for it to produce
the 450 Hz oscillations is if it is spinning.”
Strohmayer’s finding also marks the first detection of paired
QPOs from a black hole. Neutron stars often exhibit paired
QPOs, and this is thought to be a result of radiation coming
from the solid neutron star surface. Strohmayer’s detection of
paired QPOs from an object with no solid surface, therefore,
challenges these important theories of how neutron stars
produce these QPOs. The spin of a black hole would be caused
by the angular momentum of the star that formed it, Strohmayer
said, particularly if that progenitor is a spinning neutron
star.
Additional information and artistic concepts are available on
the Internet at:
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/xte/learning_center/
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/GSFC/SpaceSci/structure/spinningbh/spinningbh.htm
