July 4, 2022 —
An international team of astrophysicists has identified the site where powerful and high-energy X-rays are shot into space from inside a region of space shaped like a giant aquatic mammal called a “manatee”. They found that the spectrum of the object at this location showed that there was a “non-classical acceleration process” in which particles are injected and re-accelerated in extremely powerful jets of energy emitted by a black hole. But don’t worry about it irradiating us as it is more than 100,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers away.
Samar Safi-Harb
The astronomical object known as SS 433 has long been known to contain a black hole that produces bursts of energy ejected through the Milky Way by jets of high-energy particles. Believed to be the first known microquasar, it is at the center of what is left of an exploded star in the constellation Eagle, high in the summer night sky.
“This fascinating system looks like a beautiful manatee in space and is the only known supernova remnant in our Galaxy (out of about 400 such objects) containing a black hole,” said UM astrophysicist Dr. Samar Safi-Harb, Level 1 Research Chair in Canada in Extreme Astrophysics and lead author of the paper, which includes scientists from Canada, the United States, Europe and South Korea.
Brydyn Mac Intyre
UM team member and student Brydyn Mac Intyre helped create a stunning color image of this remarkable astronomical object. The energy bursts terminate in two “ear shells” glowing at radio wavelengths, carved out of jets swimming through space at a quarter of the speed of light. “The space along the path of the jets glows brilliantly in high-energy X-ray and gamma light tens of light-years from the black hole, but is not visible to the naked eye,” says McIntyre.
SS 433 is so powerful that astrophysicists have been looking for high-energy gamma rays from the region. In the late 1990s, Safi-Harb proposed that this system could accelerate particles to energies higher than what could be achieved in the most powerful particle accelerators on Earth. It took nearly 20 years for high-energy gamma rays to be discovered; in 2018, researchers at the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory announced the detection of high-energy TeV (tera-electron-volt) gamma rays from the system. However, the location of particle acceleration could not be determined until now.
Kaya Mori
Using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton satellite and NASA’s NuSTAR satellite, advanced orbiting X-ray telescopes, combined with data obtained from NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope, this team of researchers was able to pinpoint the location of the “hardest” (or most high energy) X-ray emitting region near SS 433, believed to be the origin of the large-scale easterly jet emission.
Dr Kaya Mori, a co-author and astrophysicist at Columbia University in New York, says this powerful energy source, which is now believed to accelerate particles to very high energies, is a strong candidate for the cosmic ‘PeVatron’, a source that which accelerates cosmic rays to penta-electronvolt energies, or 1,000,000,000,000,000 volts!
“Given the unusual nature of the spectrum and the location of the source, this finding challenges the theory of particle acceleration and points to the injection and re-energization of the SS 433 jets at great distances, nearly 100 light-years from the black hole,” says Safi-Harb .
She adds: “SS 433 teaches us and approximates the rare case of a supernova remnant powered by a black hole, microquasars, ultraluminous X-ray sources (a growing class of X-ray emission sources whose nature is debated) and is a micro-version of an active galaxy!’
Matthew Band
This work involved several students from the University of Manitoba and Columbia University, such as Matthew Band, a UM School of Engineering Summer Research Award winner at Price, who co-authored the paper.
“I didn’t expect my summer job to be separated from something like this, I’m thrilled,” he said. “It is an honor to learn from such great people and to be a member of this international collaboration.”
The researchers announced the discovery in a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal, which will soon be presented at the International Symposium on High-Energy Gamma-ray Astronomy in Barcelona.
UM Today staff
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