A team of astrophysicists capture a rare lightning storm … – 20minutos.es

Picture of the black hole Located in the center of the Milky Way. (NASA)

A team of astrophysicists Barcelona, ​​Madrid and Canary Islands has attracted unusual storm with gamma-ray flares are the fastest seen so far, into a black hole located 260 million light years. Check the night of 12 was achieved by November 13, 2012 – but so far has not published its results in the journal Science -. Thanks to telescopes ‘Magic’ of the Observatory of the Roque de los Muchachos in La Palma (Canary Islands)

The telescopes captured the gamma-ray flares quick views so far produced about a supermassive black hole , a phenomenon that scientists explained by a similar produced by lightning in a thunderstorm mechanism. That night, the telescopes ‘Magic’ gamma were observing the galaxy cluster Perseus, located at a distance of about 260 million light-years, when they detected this unusual phenomenon from a galaxy, known as IC310.

Like other galaxies IC310 contains in its center a supermassive black hole, hundreds of millions of times heavier than the sun , according to astronomers, and, sporadically, produces intense flares of gamma rays. What surprised the scientists was the extreme brevity of these flares, lasting less than five minutes.

a potential difference so strong that you just downloaded is created by like lightning As explained Julian Sitarek, Juan de la Cierva researcher at the Institute of Physics of High Energies (IFAE) in Barcelona, ​​”Relativity tells us that no object can be issued for a shorter time to it takes for light to cross it . ” “We know that the black hole in IC310 has a size of about 20 light-minutes, about three times the distance between the Sun and Earth. This means that any phenomenon produced by it should last less than 20 minutes,” he Sitarek told, one of the scientists who led the study.

So, scientists have proposed a new theory, according to which this “gamma storm” occurs in regions that are empty formed at the magnetic poles of the black hole, where momentarily very strong electric fields, which are destroyed when the area is reoccupied by charged particles are created.

These particles are accelerated very close to that of light and transformed into gamma rays speeds photons on their way to the transfer to them of their energy. The time it takes light to travel one of these empty areas is few minutes, which fits with observations in IC310. “It’s similar to what happens in thunderstorms,” ​​has it compared Oscar Blanch, researcher IFAE.

“A potential difference so strong that eventually discharged as lightning is created” , said the scientist. In this case, the discharge reaches the highest energies observed in nature and produces gamma rays, so the black hole appears to be involved in a storm of stellar dimensions. Until now, scientists thought that the gamma emission of galaxies as IC310 was generated in the jets of particles produced by the black hole.

But in this case the researchers believe that “surely the gamma rays come long below: practically black hole itself “. The Magic telescopes consist of two telescopes reflectors 17 meters in diameter, built and operated by an international collaboration consists of 160 scientists from Spain, Germany, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, Finland, Bulgaria, Croatia, Japan and India and celebrate now its tenth birthday with the release of his fifth scientific paper in the journal Science.