20/09/2024
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XRISM revealed the shape, motion and temperature of the material surrounding the supermassive black hole and supernova remnant in unprecedented detail. Astronomers released the first scientific results of a new X-ray telescope today, less than a year after the telescope arrived. start.
What do a supermassive black hole and the remnants of a supermassive star have in common? These are mysterious celestial events where superheated gas emits intense X-ray light that the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) can detect.
In its first published results, XRISM, a mission led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) with participation from ESA, demonstrates its unique ability to reveal the velocity and temperature of the gas hot gas, called plasma, and three layers of material surrounding the black hole and the exploded star.
“These new observations provide important insights into how black holes grow by absorbing material from their surroundings, and provide new insights into the life and death of supermassive stars. They show a unique ability on a mission to explore the high-energy Universe,” says ESA XRISM Project Scientist Matteo Guainazzi.
Supernova remnant N132D
In one of its “first light” observations, XRISM focused on N132D, a supernova remnant located in the Large Magellanic Cloud about 160,000 light-years from Earth. This ‘bubble’ of hot gas was ejected by the explosion of a massive star about 3000 years ago.
Using its Resolution instrument, XRISM revealed the structure around N132D in detail. Contrary to earlier assumptions of a simple round shell, the scientists found that the N132D residue is shaped like a donut. Using the Doppler effect, they measured the velocity (velocity) at which the hot plasma in the remnant moves towards us or away from us, and confirmed that this is increasing at an apparent speed of about 1200 km / s.
Burning hot iron in the remnants of supernova N132D
Resolve also revealed that the remains contain iron with an unusual temperature of 10 billion degrees Kelvin. Metal atoms were heated during a supernova explosion by strong shock waves propagating inward, something that was predicted in theory, but never seen before.
Supernova remnants like N132D hold important information about how stars evolve and how (heavy) elements essential to our life, such as iron, are produced and distributed in the interstellar space. However, previous X-ray studies have had difficulty revealing how the velocity and temperature of the plasma were distributed.
A supermassive black hole in the galaxy NGC 4151
XRISM also shed new light on the mysterious structure surrounding the supermassive black hole. Focused on the galaxy NGC 4151, 62 million light-years away, the XRISM observatory provides an unprecedented view of objects very close to the black hole at the center of the galaxy, with a mass 30 million times that of the Sun.
XRISM captured the distribution of matter around and eventually collapsing into a black hole over a wide radius, from 0.001 to 0.1 light-years, a distance roughly comparable to the separation of the Sun- Uranus is 100 times more than that.
XRISM study of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy NGC 4151
By detecting the motion of metal atoms from the X-ray signature, scientists mapped the sequence of structures around the supermassive black hole: from the disk ‘feeding’ the hole and black to a donut-shaped torus.
These findings provide an important piece of the puzzle in understanding how black holes grow by accreting matter from the environment.
Although radio and infrared observations have revealed the presence of donut-shaped toruses around black holes in other galaxies, the XRISM spectroscopic method is the first, and now the just a way to find out how the gas near the central ‘monster’ is shaped and moves.
Artist’s impression of the supermassive black hole in NGC 4151
Looking Ahead: Future Insights and Discoveries
In the past months, the scientific team of XRISM has worked actively to establish the functionality of the equipment and to improve the methods of data analysis by observing 60 important targets. Similarly, 104 new observations were selected from more than 300 announcements made by scientists around the world.
XRISM will make observations based on successful proposals in the coming year; due to its exceptional performance all around, which exceeds initial expectations, this promises many more exciting things to come.
About XRISM
XRISM for short
The X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) launched on September 7, 2023. It is a collaboration between the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NASA, with a major contribution from ESA. In order to provide hardware and science advice, ESA has been allocated 8% of the available XRISM observing time.
The observations made with XRISM will complement those from ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray telescope, and will be an excellent basis for observations planned for the future of ESA’s NewAthena cluster. The latter is designed to greatly exceed the scientific performance of existing spectroscopic and X-ray probes.
Notes for editors
These results of the XRISM Collaboration are accepted for publication in the Astronomical Society of Japan and The Astronomical Journal. Preprints are available here https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.14300 and here https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.14301.
Original flow on the XRISM website.
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