Tomasz Nowakowski is a member of the physics.org community.
An international team of astronomy has investigated a peculiar behavior of quasi-periodic eruptions in an active galaxy using two satellites. The results of the study were published on arXiv.org.
The phenomenon of X-ray quasi-periodic eruptions is associated with super massive black holes. There are high-amplitude bursts of X-ray radiation that come from the SMBHs.
Located some 250 million light years away in the constellation of Sculptor, GSN 069 is an active galaxy first detected in 2010 with X MM-Newton. There is a black hole with a mass of 400,000 solar mass.
The X-ray light curve shows high-amplitude and short-lived X-ray flares. The QPEs were found to be increasing the X-ray count rate in the hardest energy bands.
Giovanni Miniutti of the Spanish Astrobiology Center in Madrid, Spain analyzed data from Chandra and XMM-Newton in order to get more insight into the nature of the bursts.
We discuss the long- and short-timescale properties of both QPEs and continuum emission over the past in this work.
QPEs in GSN 069 are a thing of the past. The first and last QPE were identified in the same month. Between 1 and 5 years were the times when these eruptions took place.
QPEs measured in high energy bands peak earlier and have shorter duration than measured at softer energies. At the average observation-dependent recurrence time, the quiescent level variability in observations with Q PEs shows a quasi-periodic oscillation.
After the first X-ray detection, the X-ray emission of GSN 069 re-brightened, reaching a second peak about 1011 years later.
The QPE properties of GSN 069 may be explained by a scenario in which a pair of white dwarfs are captured by the SMBH.
After a few years from the initial TDE-like event, the survivingWD overfills its own Roche lobe at each peri center passage. The observed Q PEs are produced by the tidal stripping events.
More information: G. Miniutti et al, Disappearance of quasi periodic-eruptions (QPEs) in GSN 069, simultaneous X-ray re-brightening, and predicted QPE re-appearance. arXiv:2207.07511v1 [astro-ph.HE], arxiv.org/abs/2207.07511There is a science network.
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