Have we first hunted the birth of a black hole? 45 astronomers think yes

In June last year, ATLAS in Hawaii saw a new object in the sky, similar to the supernova, but its maximum brightness was much higher and disappeared much faster than the usual supernova. These differences aroused the alarm for astronomers, so they directed their remarks against it and concluded it It's about the birth of a black hole.

Supernova is called a "cow" (a typical name, whose interpretation we will now see), and a group of 45 astronomers believe that this is a for the first time, that a man chases a moment when a star dies causes a black hole. The results of the study were presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle (Washington, USA) and will be published shortly in the Astrophysical Journal.

Since the discovery was nothing normal (forever)

We're talking about a supernova when it explodes a big star or "dies," though From this explosion a black hole or neutron star emerges. We talked about them, for example, when Víctor Buso, an amateur astronomer, discovered one by accident, which was important given the difficulty of finding.

In this case, we saw an object with some anomalous behavior, called AT2018cow, that is, not long after the nickname "cow" (cow English is a cow). Vaca is in the CGCG 137-068 galaxy on "only" 200 million light-years away from the Roman road and looks towards the constellation Hercules.

Vaca has been something special since the beginning, since the supernova was found, which allowed astronomers to observe it with unprecedented details, as explained in National Geographic. We said that its maximum brightness is something unusual and actually registered light is ten times higher than a standard explosion stars (detected in X-rays). The brightness, which is also dimmed in days when the normal brightness of the supernova decreases.

This contributed to the fact that waste that was excluded from the explosion was much smaller (and different composition) than expected, and radiation was not expected. They even thought that they were dealing with human mistakes, as Raffaella Margutti, the director of Raffaella Margutti (astrophysics at the Northwestern University), catalogs the discovery as "the goal they have been waiting for years."

So they conclude that the "cow" is the formation of a black hole or a neutron star. Some of this has not been taken into account so far immediately after birth and may constitute a new class of objects within an existing category of "fast light transient objects".

Space and a special cow

Remains for investigate about the same cow, how his "central engine" works (ie the core that is outside the observed waste). It is considered to be a compact central engine that releases high-energy X-ray rays and is covered by the amorphous and asymmetric mass of the material that comes from a kind of explosion.

In their opinion, this improper event can help that astronomers better understand the physics of the birth of a black hole or a neutron star, so we'll see if there are more of these findings on this particular space cow or we know this phenomenon better.

Picture | NASA / CXC / SAO