A new class of black holes discovered

 Astronomers discovered a whole new class of black hole jet as bright as 10 trillion suns        

Scientists have observed a new type of black hole that is too heavy to have been born from a star but still too slim to act as an anchor for an entire galaxy. These black holes are being being referred to as “lite” intermediate-mass black holes (IMBH), and they’re extremely hard to identify because of how low-frequency their signals tend to be. "They are transforming the first light of the universe into high-energy jets," Jaya Maithil, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard and Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, said at the 246th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Anchorage, Alaska. The quest to find these IMBHs has come about due to the fact that we’ve discovered ultra massive black holes which can measure up to millions of times the mass of our sun, while others can sit at just 50 solar masses or below. Astronomers wanted to understand where any mid-sized black holes might fit in, so they began looking harder.

Using data from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), Maithil and her team found that each jet spans a whopping 300,000 light-years, nearly three times the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. Each jet emerges from an actively feeding supermassive black hole, known as a quasar, located about 11.6 billion and 11.7 billion light-years away. Scientists spot high-speed galaxy collision 11 billion light-years away: 'We hence call this system the cosmic joust'. A monster black hole awakens and begins blasting out X-ray bursts. What they discovered is that lite intermediate-mass black holes do indeed exist. However, finding them is difficult. To make it easier, the researchers used Virgo and LIGO, two gravitational wave detectors. Using the detectors, astronomers were able to find multiple black holes ranging in size from 100 to 300 times the mass of the sun.

NASA spacecraft spots monster black hole bursting with X-rays 'releasing a hundred times more energy than we have seen elsewhere'. This supermassive black hole is eating way too quickly, and 'burping' at near-light speeds. The researchers observed these immense structures as they appeared when the universe was just 3 billion years old, during a period when galaxies and their central black holes were growing at breakneck speed. "These quasars are like cosmic time capsules," Maithil said. "If we understand them, we can understand how they were impacting the growth of their galaxy and the environment in which they resided." While still massive, these black holes are not anywhere near powerful enough to have been born from dying stars or to hold galaxies together. So, where do they fit into the universe? Well, researchers believe they could have been born from mergers which happen out in the cosmos. While completing a run from 2019 to 2020, the LIGO and Virgo network logged 11 mergers which could fit the bill for these cosmic objects.

One of the newfound jets, from a quasar known as J1610+1811, is visible in the Chandra image. A slender, faint purple line extends from the quasar's brilliant white core toward the upper right, ending in a small, bright blob. A second, dimmer jet appears to shoot in the opposite direction, downward and to the left. "It's like looking for candlelight in close vicinity to a flashlight that's blazing toward us," Maithil said. A study on the findings is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The researchers gave details of how they classified the new class of black holes, breaking down the exact way they discovered them and why they are so important. The hope is that some of these smaller black holes could offer us a glimpse into the time when the first stars lived and died. What makes these jets particularly noteworthy is that they remain visible across billions of light-years. Maithil and her team suggested that the jets shine in X-rays thanks to interactions with the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the faint relic radiation left over after the universe cooled enough for starlight to travel freely for the first time, marking the end of the "cosmic dark ages."

As we detect more and more of these lite intermediate-mass black holes, researchers believe we find even more reason to be excited about them. Back when these jets formed, the CMB was far denser than it is today, filling space with a sea of low-energy photons. As electrons in the jets raced outward at near light speed, they slammed into these CMB photons, boosting them into the X-ray range detectable by Chandra, according to the new study. This process makes them visible across cosmic gulfs, despite their proximity to the quasars' dazzling cores, the researchers said. The jet from J1610+1811 clocks in at 92% to 98% light, carrying about half as much energy as all the light emitted by matter spiralling into the black hole, a staggering output equivalent to that from 10 trillion suns, the new study found. The second quasar, J1405+0415, located 11.7 billion light-years from Earth, features a jet just as powerful. By combining Chandra's X-ray and VLA's radio data, the researchers calculated that particles in the J1405+0415 jet are traveling at 95% to 99% the speed of light. "We're finding that some black holes may carry a bigger punch at this stage in the universe than we thought," Maithil said. Understanding them could not only unlock the secrets of the early universe, but it could also help us refine the models that we use to view the universe as a whole.