Russian astrophysicists have learned to study the properties of the "tails" of supermassive black holes, the most powerful emissions of light and charged particles, based on the recently discovered discrepancies in their appearance in the optical and radio bands, according to an article published in the journal MNRAS.
“It can be said without exaggeration that this is the discovery of a new direction in observational astrophysics. Comparison of data from radio interferometers and optical telescopes will help us to obtain information on accretion disks around black holes and hot jets at the centers of galaxies in visible light. Now we understand better how they work and what processes are taking place there,”says Yuri Kovalev, head of the laboratory at the Astro Space Center of FIAN, quoted by the press service of the MIPT.
Supermassive black holes exist at the center of almost every galaxy. Unlike black holes, which appear when stars collapse, their mass is several million times that of the Sun. They periodically absorb stars, other celestial bodies and gas, ejecting part of the captured matter in the form of jets - beams of heated plasma moving at near-light speed.
Four years ago, the GAIA "stargazer" probe was launched, observing about a billion stars in the Milky Way and hundreds of thousands of distant galaxies, in whose centers active black holes live. Observations of black holes were not the main task of this telescope, but they did allow scientists to determine their exact coordinates.
These measurements, according to the astrophysicist, revealed an unexpected thing - it turned out that the position of supermassive black holes, calculated using radio telescopes, in some cases did not coincide with what GAIA "saw". According to the calculations of Kovalev and his colleague Leonid Petrov, about 6% of the quasars observed by the European probe had such "impossible" anomalies.
Trying to understand what these shifts in the position of black holes can be connected with, Kovalev and Petrov analyzed and compared the properties of all such objects that were observed by GAIA and radio telescopes on Earth. As the scientists note, such a large number of "errors" in the coordinates of quasars prompted them to think that these shifts may be associated not with measurement errors, but with the properties of the black holes themselves.
“Not everything is visible in the radio range, for example, the accretion disk of a supermassive black hole is bright in optics and ultraviolet. Therefore, we decided to try to combine data from two sources,”continues Kovalev.
It turned out that the shifts in the position of the quasar in the optical range were not accidental, but associated with the device and position of the jets, fiery "tails" of black holes. This relationship, the scientist explains, makes it possible to study the structure of quasar emissions in the optical range with a fantastically high resolution, inaccessible to the Hubble and other powerful telescopes, by combining optical images with data from radio telescopes.
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Thanks to this, Kovalev notes, his team has already managed to discover very long and bright jets near several black holes, the existence of which scientists had not previously suspected.
In addition, this discovery has an applied aspect: observations of quasars using radio telescope networks are now used to create a reference frame for navigation. Based on this data, scientists track the movement of the continents and measure the parameters of the Earth's rotation for the GLONASS system. The discovery of Russian astronomers shows that the coordinates of black holes in optics can "float" over time, which limits the applicability of optical telescopes for such purposes.
