A Black hole gamma-ray lightning was recorded in The Canary Islands
The MAGIC telescopes at La Palma have recorded the fastest gamma-ray flares seen to date during the night from 12 to 13 November 2012
This result, with an important Spanish contribution, has been published in Science Magazine.
Barcelona, 6th November 2014
Scientists from the Institute of Space Sciences (CSIC-IEEC) in collaboration with other scientists from Barcelona, The Canary Islands and Madrid have recorded an extraordinary gamma-ray lightning, with the fastest gamma-ray flares seen to date, near a black hole 260 million light-years away. The flares were recorded by he MAGIC telescopes at La Palma and the result has been published in Science Magazine.
The fenomenon was detected during the night from 12 to 13 November 2012 in the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos (La Palma, Canary Islands) and came from one of the galaxies of the Perseus cluster, at a distance of about 260 million light-years, known as IC310. As many other galaxies, IC310 hosts in its center a super-massive black hole.
The scientists explain this phenomenon by a mechanism similar to that producing lightning in a storm according to which this “gamma-ray storm” is produced in the vacuum regions created close to the black hole magnetic poles. Very intense electric fields appear in these regions, and are destroyed when they are filled again with charged particles. These particles are accelerated up to close the speed of light, subsequently transferring part of their energy to the photons they find in their way, thus converting them into gamma rays. The time needed for the light to cross one of these vacuum regions is of a few minutes, in agreement with the observations of IC310. “It is similar to what happens in an electric storm”, explains Emma de Oña-Wilhelmi, Ramón y Cajal researcher at Institute of Space Science (CSIC/IEEC) and MAGIC galactical coordinator. “The potential difference is so large that it ends up discharging into a lightning”. In this case, the discharge reaches the highest energies observed in nature, and produces gamma rays. The black hole appears to be immersed in a storm of colossal proportions.
On this occasion, the scientists were astonished by the brevity of the flares, lasting only for a five minutes. “Relativity tells us that no object can emit for a time shorter than it takes light to cross it. We know that the black hole in IC310 has a size of about 20 light-minutes, approximately three times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. This means that the black hole cannot produce a flare shorter than 20 minutes”, says Julian Sitarek, a Juan de la Cierva researcher at IFAE (Barcelona), and one of the three leading scientists of this work.
Up until now, the gamma ray emissions from galaxies such as IC310 were believed to originate in the particle jets produced by the black holes. These jets are detected in many galaxies, and they expand for hundreds of thousands light-years. When a jet points directly towards the Earth, a relativistic effect, called “apparent superluminous motion”, is produced, due to the similar speeds at which the emitter (jet particles) and the emission (the gamma rays) travel toward us. As a result, the measured intensity of the gamma-ray emission is higher, and its variability faster. However, this explication does not apply to the case of IC310, as its jets do not point at us. The gamma rays must be created practically on the black hole itself.
MAGIC is the present of a young yet fruitful field of science known as Ground-based Gamma-ray Astronomy. Its first steps at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias trace back to the 1980s, with the HEGRA telescopes. The imminent future of the field is the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), to be formed of about 100 telescopes at two observatories (in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres). The Spanish groups of the MAGIC Collaboration have presented a candidacy to build the CTA-North observatory at Roque de los Muchachos or at Teide. This is the best opportunity for Spain to host one of the major global scientific installations that will mark the progress of Astronomy in the years to come.
MAGIC consists of two, 17-m diameter reflective telescopes, built and operated by an international collaboration of 160 scientists from Spain, Germany, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, Finland, Bulgaria, Croatia, Japan and India. MAGIC is celebrating its tenth anniversary with its fifth scientific publication in Science Magazine. Major contributions of the Spanish groups to the construction of MAGIC include the original camera of one of the telescopes, most of the electronics and the data center. The success of the experiment has been possible thanks to the quality of the sky at La Palma. The Spanish institutes participating in the experiment are: Instituto de Física de Altas Energías (IFAE, Barcelona), Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Universidad de Barcelona, Instituto de Ciencias del Espacio (CSIC-IEEC, Barcelona), Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC, La Laguna), Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas (CIEMAT, Madrid).
Further information on MAGIC: https://wwwmagic.mpp.mpg.de/
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbXU5l_btUQ&feature=youtu.be
Credit: The MAGIC Collaboration
THE MAGIC TELESCOPES AT THE OBSERVATORIO DEL ROQUE DE LOS MUCHACHOS, IN LA PALMA (full-resolution picture available at: https://magicold.mpp.mpg.de/gallery/pictures/IMG_2520.JPG
Credit: The MAGIC Collaboration
Reference: Science Express, November 6, 2014
MAGIC OBSERVATIONS OF IC310 AND RADIO CONTOURS OF THE PARTICLE JET (ZOOM)
Reference: Science Express, November 6, 2014
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