NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has discovered that the cosmic landscape at the center of a group of galaxies has been profoundly reorganized due to multiple eruptions of a supermassive black hole over 50 million years old.
The serial eruptions of black holes were discovered while astronomers were studying the NGC 5813 complex , a group of galaxies located about 105 million light-years from Earth. Unlike galaxy clusters (which can contain even thousands of galaxies), galaxy clusters only host 50 or fewer galaxies. And all of them are surrounded by huge amounts of hot gas that emits X-rays, electromagnetic radiation, invisible to the human eye, on which this artificial satellite has been working since 1999.
According to the study, published in The Astrophysical Journal , the supermassive black hole that has erupted is located in the central galaxy of NGC 5813 and its bursts were measured thanks to the study of the cavities that are produced when the black hole generates waves shock that push the surrounding gas outward and in turn produce a huge hole or gap. Scientists have counted up to three pairs of cosmic cavities, representing three distinct eruptions from the large central black hole. Never have so many eruptions been detected from the same group of galaxies .
In the image captured by Chandra, which shows the visible light data in red, green and blue colors and the X-ray spectrum in purple, the three cavities can be seen perfectly as sharp edges of the same drawing. These crash fronts are, according to experts, similar to the sonic stampede effect that a supersonic aircraft creates.
Scientists’ calculations have also revealed that the average speed of the random movements of the hot gas caused by the black hole can reach 258,000 kilometers per hour .
