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Chandra Finds Evidence for Swarm of Black Holes Near the Galactic CenterJanuary 10, 2005NASA RELEASE: 05-002 Steve Roy Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL Phone: 256-544-6535 Megan Watzke Chandra X-ray Observatory Center, CfA, Cambridge, MA Phone: 617-496-7998
These relatively small, stellar-mass black holes, along with neutron stars, appear to have migrated into the Galactic Center over the course of several billion years. Such a dense stellar graveyard has been predicted for years, and this represents the best evidence to date of its existence. The Chandra data may also help astronomers better understand how the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way grows. The discovery was made as part of Chandra's ongoing program of monitoring the region around Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. It was announced today by Michael Muno of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego, CA.
"Although the region around Sgr A* is crowded with stars, we expected that there was only a 20 percent chance that we would find even one X-ray binary within a three-light-year radius," said Muno. "The observed high concentration of these sources implies that a huge number of black holes and neutron stars have gathered in the center of the Galaxy." Mark Morris, also of UCLA and a coauthor on the present work, had predicted a decade ago that a process called dynamical friction would cause stellar black holes to sink toward the center of the Galaxy. Black holes are formed as remnants of the explosions of massive stars and have masses of about 10 suns. As black holes orbit the center of the Galaxy at a distance of several light years, they pull on surrounding stars, which pull back on the black holes.
Once black holes are concentrated near Sgr A*, they will have numerous close encounters with normal stars there, some of which are in binary star systems. The intense gravity of a black hole can induce an ordinary star to "change partners" and pair up with the black hole while ejecting its companion. This process and a similar one for neutron stars are expected to produce several hundreds of black hole and neutron star binary systems. "If only one percent of these binary systems are X-ray active each year, they can account for the sources we see," said Eric Pfahl of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and a coauthor of a paper describing these results that has been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "Although the evidence is mostly circumstantial, it makes a strong case for the existence of a large population of neutron stars and stellar-mass black holes within three light-years of the center of our Galaxy."
In the meantime, the acceleration of low-mass stars by black holes will eject low-mass stars from the central region. This expulsion will reduce the likelihood that normal stars will be captured by the central supermassive black hole. This may explain why the central regions of some galaxies, including the Milky Way, are fairly quiet even though they contain a supermassive black hole. The region analyzed in this research near Sgr A* has been observed 16 times between 1999 and 2004 using Chandra's Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS) instrument. Other members of the research team include Frederick K. Baganoff (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Niel Brandt (Penn State), Andrea Ghez and Jessica Lu (UCLA). NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Mass. Additional information and images are available at:
http://chandra.harvard.edu and http://chandra.nasa.gov [Press Index] [Press Releases] [Milky Way Galaxy Releases] [Neutron Star/X-ray Binary Releases] |
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Revised: September 06, 2006
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