An international team of astronomers recently discovered bright flashes of radiation, or "lightning," emanating from a supermassive black hole 260 million light-years away from Earth.
The MAGIC telescopes on La Palma recently measured powerful outbursts of gamma rays coming from this black hole, which sits in the center of galaxy IC 310 in the Perseus constellation. This radiation was so powerful that it is the strongest and brightest ever detected outside of the Milky Way.
At first, this burst of radiation perplexed astronomers. The light only varied for about five minutes. However, when light enters a black hole, it eventually reaches the event horizon, where it cannot escape. But the event horizon's distance is nearly 300 million miles, meaning that it would take light at least 25 minutes to reach the point of no return and disappear.
So where was this pulse of mysterious bright light coming from? It turns out that this particular black hole has a rapidly rotating active galactic nuclei (AGN) surrounded by a magnetic field. This means that its extreme mass (one million to several billion times the mass of our sun), sometimes creates these powerful radiation bursts. This creates jets of radiation, which blows gas into space almost at the speed of light.
"In the polar regions, there seem to be strong electric fields which accelerate the particles to relativistic speeds, thus generating high energies and ultimately - in interaction with particles of low energies— gamma rays with very fast time variations," says Masahiro Teshima, director at the Max Planck Institute for Physics.
This phenomenon is similar to lightning during thunderstorms. Energy that's accumulated gets discharged by lightning every few minutes. With the black hole in IC 310, the energy collects in an area the size of our solar system, so that means that the discharge, or the lightning, is super fast and super bright.
"When we observe black holes at high energies, we are looking into the galactic nucleus to very great depths. We are trying to look directly into the machinery at the centre, as it were," says Razmik Mirzoyan, of the Max Planck Institute for Physics.
And now, thanks to MAGIC, we have our first images of this phenomenon, in detail, allowing us a sneak peek into the heart of a supermassive black hole and solving the mystery of how these jets of radiation form.
[Photo Credit: MAGIC Collaboration]
