A heartbeat from beyond

“Oh, no! Oh god! Could things like them exist?” Were my first thoughts upon hearing about there being some sort of heartbeat in space. Me being a lifelong comics fan, my mind instantly jumped to characters like Unicron and Galactus, massive cosmic beings who consumed all the planets in their wake. However, seeing as how there is not any media hysteria, and this topic is only discussed in small online circles, this does not appear to be the case. This tale began roughly a few weeks ago when in the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. International researchers using the decades worth of data from the Fermi Gamma-ray space telescope discovered a heartbeat inside a cosmic gas cloud within the constellation Aquila. With this gas cloud being dubbed Fermi1913+0515. According to Germany’s DESY national research center, the cloud’s beats are in rhythm with a black hole 100 light-years away. This suggests that there might be a link between the two. These findings were published on August 17 in the journal nature astronomy. The black hole is part of a microquasar. As the name suggests, it is a smaller version of a quasar defined as a massive and extremely remote celestial object, emitting enormous amounts of energy, and typically having a starlike image in a telescope. Some suggest that quasars contain massive black holes and may represent a stage in some galaxies’ evolution. The specific system where the black hole is located is known as SS 433, which alongside that black hole, contains a star that’s nearly 30 times the mass of our suns. The star and black hole both orbit each other, and as expected, the black hole takes in matter from the sun, which creates an accretion disk around the black hole, which occurs every 13 days. An accretion disk is a structure (often a circumstellar disk) formed by diffuse material in orbital motion around a massive central body. The central body is typically a star. Friction causes orbiting material in the disk to spiral inward towards the central body. To quote Jian Li, a lead author of the study from the DESY national research center: “This material accumulates in an accretion disc before falling into the black hole, like water in the whirl above the drain of a bathtub.” “However, a part of that matter does not fall down the drain but shoots out at high speed in two narrow jets in opposite directions above and below the rotating accretion disk.” These jets consist of high-speed particles and ultra-strong magnetic fields that produce x-rays and gamma-rays, which the Fermi telescope detected. However, it is believed that the jets shot out into space in a spiral path and not a straight one because the disks wobble. Scientists found that the gas cloud had a similar behavioral pattern to the microquasar. With the jets sways lasting 126 days, the scientists speculate that the Clouds beat or the black hole somehow powers emissions. One theory suggests that the cause is the injection of the nuclei of hydrogen atoms into the cloud. However, scientists are yet to determine how the black hole powers the cloud. Jian states: “Finding such an unambiguous connection via timing, about 100 light-years away from the microquasar, not even along the direction of the jets is as unexpected as amazing.” “But how the black hole can power the gas cloud’s heartbeat is unclear to us.” So sorry fellow nihilistic comics fans, but Earth will not be anyone’s meal any time soon. Source: https://www.space.com/amp/mysterious-gamma-ray-heartbeat-gas-cloud .html https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.firstpost.com/tech/science/cosmic-heartbeat-discovered-in-gas-cloud-synced-with-a-black-hole-by-arecibo-fermi-telescopes-8722711.html/amp https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/nasa-heartbeat-cosmic-gas-cloud-space-a9674406.html%3famp