Nasa has spotted a monster black hole so strange it ‘shouldn’t exist’.
The Hubble Space Telescope was used to zoom in on a supermassive black hole at the heart of the ‘magnificent’ spiral galaxy NGC 3147, which is located 130 million light-years away.
It’s surrounded by a ‘furiously whirling’ disc of material which ‘shouldn’t be there, based on current astronomical theories’.
The discovery has allowed scientists to test Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity.
General relativity describes gravity as the curvature of space, whilst special relativity discusses the relationship between time and space.
‘We’ve never seen the effects of both general and special relativity in visible light with this much clarity,’ said Marco Chiaberge of the European Space Agency, and the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, both in Baltimore, Maryland, a member of the team that conducted the Hubble study.
‘This is an intriguing peek at a disk very close to a black hole, so close that the velocities and the intensity of the gravitational pull are affecting how the photons of light look,’ added the study’s first author, Stefano Bianchi of Università degli Studi Roma Tre, in Rome, Italy.
‘We cannot understand the data unless we include the theories of relativity.’
Black holes in galaxies like NGC 3147 are ‘malnourished’ because they do not capture enough material to feed themselves regularly.
This means the behemoths are generally surrounded by a cloud of material which ‘puffs up like a doughnut’ rather than forming a flat, pancake-shaped disc.
Nasa said ‘it is very puzzling why there is a thin disk encircling a starving black hole in NGC 3147 that mimics much more powerful disks found in extremely active galaxies with engorged, monster black holes’.
Ari Laor of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology located in Haifa, Israel, said: ‘What we saw was something completely unexpected. We found gas in motion producing features we can explain only as being produced by material rotating in a thin disk very close to the black hole.’
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