Death Star? Not Just for Star Wars. Astronomers have in fact recently spotted a disturbing phenomenon: 16 black holes which literally launched powerful beams of particles into space, then changed aim and fired at new celestial targets.
This cosmic firing range, reminiscent of the Death Star’s destruction of the planet Alderaan in Star Wars, could help scientists determine the impacts that black holes have on surrounding galaxies.
The team behind the observations studied 16 erupting supermassive black holes using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA)a system of ten remotely operated robotic radio telescopes from Socorro, New Mexico. This allowed scientists to discover that jets from supermassive black holes can change direction by up to nearly 90 degrees.
“We found that about a third of the rays now point in completely different directions than before.“, the group leader declared in a note Francesco Ubertosi of the University of Bologna. “These 16 black holes known as Death Stars are spinning and pointing toward new targets, like the fictional space station from Star Wars.”.
The team monitored the direction in which supermassive black holes directed jets of high-energy particles, which were expelled at speeds close to that of light as they reached distances of many light years from their sources. They also used X-ray data from Chandra to examine two cavities or “bubbles” in the interstellar gas that pointed to the direction in which the same black holes fired the same jets millions of years ago. Comparing the two data sets allowed them to ascertain how supermassive black holes had reoriented their jets.
This reorientation takes place on time scales ranging from a million years a few tens of millions of years. This may seem incredibly slow, but considering how long these cosmic titans have existed, it is relatively short.
