RESEARCHERS have uncovered radio signals that are believed to be emerging from a black hole.
The object, called GRS 1915+105, consists of a regular star orbiting a stellar black hole.
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Stellar black holes form when the center of a very massive star collapses in upon itself.
Now, scientists noticed some changes in the jet material that is frequently ejected from the black hole.
It’s normal for material that derives from stars to get consumed by nearby black holes.
Black holes typically consume most of the material, but some of it gets turned into jet streams that are spit back out.
However, researchers have now noticed “periodic changes in the jet occurring within a fraction of a second,” Live Science noted.
The changes were observed by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) in China.
Researchers said that the changes could be explained by the fact that the black hole’s rotation is misaligned with its accretion disk.
An accretion disk is a flattened or elliptical structure that forms when space material is pulled toward a black hole.
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“That could be causing the jet to wobble almost like a cosmic spinning top,” Live Science explained.
“When the jet points away, its energy drops. A fraction of a second later, it returns to normal when the system rotates back,” it added.
“The peculiar signal has a rough period of 0.2 seconds or a frequency of about 5 Hertz,” Wei Wang, a professor of astrophysics at Wuhan University in China and the lead author of the study, said in a statement.
“Such a signal does not always exist and only shows up under special physical conditions,” Wang added.
“Our team was lucky enough to catch the signal twice — in January 2021 and June 2022, respectively.”
GRS 1915+105 is the heaviest of the stellar black holes so far known in the Milky Way Galaxy.
The stellar black hole is located about 28,000 light-years from Earth and was first discovered in the early 90s.
The new findings were published in the journal Nature.
