The Chandra Space Telescope has discovered an extremely young and relatively nearby black hole

According to Prof. Avi Leib from the Harvard Smithsonian Center, one of the discoverers 0 The supernova SN-1979C in the galaxy M100, which is 50 million light years away from us, gave birth to a black hole

Astronomers using the Chandra X-ray Telescope have discovered evidence of the youngest known black hole in our cosmic environment. The 31-year-old black hole provides a unique opportunity to observe this type of object - and how they develop from infancy.

The supernova SN-1979C in the M100 galaxy, 50 million light-years away from us gave birth to a black hole, according to a summary of 31 years of observation of it since its appearance, with massive assistance from the Chandra Space Telescope. This is what Prof. Avi Leib, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said at a press conference held this evening by NASA in Washington on the occasion of the discovery.

According to the data provided by the NASA personnel who participated in the press conference, it is a stellar black boy with five solar masses that was created from a supernova explosion of a star with 20 solar masses. There are probably millions of them across the galaxy, but we don't know their age. Here is one whose age we know and through continued observations we will be able to know how black holes behave.

This way of creation is different from the known way (at least in theory) until now of the eruption of gamma rays, which are sometimes called the birth scream of a black hole, through the merger of two neutron stars, or from a neutron star that rotated at high speed, on the other hand, for us it is a normal birth from the eruption of a star that has ended its life in the main series.

It had an original mass of 20 solar masses. There are variables such as how much matter was lost to it before the explosion and whether it has a companion star (probably yes). Here we probably have a case that allows us to know what is the dividing line between a neutron star and a black star. Even if it is a pulsar nebula like the Cancer Nebula, it is also a good, rare and fresh example of this type. It will allow us to understand the evolution of such objects over time.

The black hole may help scientists better understand how massive stars explode, which ones leave behind a black hole or neutron star, and the number of black holes in our galaxy and others.

The object is a remnant of the supernova SN 1979C in the galaxy M100 which is 50 million light years away from Earth. The combined data from Chandra, Swift, the European XMM Newton satellite and the German ROSAT satellite revealed a bright X-ray source that remained as a bubble throughout observations from 1995 to 2007. This raises the possibility that the object is a black hole fed either by material falling onto it from the supernova or the binary companion His in a double star system. According to Leib, if it was another object, and not a black hole, the X-radiation from it would have faded long ago.

"If our interpretation is correct, this is the closest example of the birth of a black hole that we have ever observed," says Daniel Fanouda of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the study.

Scientists believe that SN 1979C, which was first discovered by an amateur astronomer in 1979, was formed when a star with a mass 20 times that of the Sun collapsed. Many of the new black holes in the distant universe have been discovered in the form of gamma-ray bursts, but SN 1979C is different in that it is much closer and belongs to a type of supernovae unlikely to be accompanied by gamma-ray bursts. The theory predicts that most black holes in the universe will form when the core of a star collapses and no gamma ray burst is produced.

"This will be the first time that the more conventional way of creating a black hole has been observed," says Avi Leib, his co-author of the paper and also from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "However, it is very difficult to detect this type of black hole birth because it takes years of observation in the X-ray field to detect these cases."

The idea of ​​a black hole with an observed age of 30 years is consistent with recent theories. In 2005, a theory was proposed that the bright visible light of these supernovae receives energy from jets from the black hole that failed to penetrate the star's envelope of gas and hydrogen to create a gamma-ray burst. The results as seen in this supernova fit this theory.

Although the evidence points to a black hole in SN 1979C, another possibility is that it is a rapidly spinning neutron star emitting a wind of high-energy particles that may be responsible for the X-rays. This would make SN 1979C the youngest example of a "solar wind pulsar" and the youngest neutron star. The Cancer pulsar, the best-known example of a nebula formed from a bright pulsar, is about 950 years old.

"There is great reward in seeing how the commitment of the most advanced telescopes in space like Chandra can complete the story," says John Morse, chief of the Astrophysics Division at NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

Avi Leib in an interview with the Hidaan website: hundreds of rogue black holes are lurking for the milk