Julian Shapiro, Chilescope T1
Julian Shapiro, a 17-year-old student from Dalton High School in New York City, accidentally discovered remnants of a black hole, the exploded galaxy is twice as wide as the Milky Way galaxy.
Long after the a black hole explodes, traces of it can still be seen in the gas clouds around it, glowing with residual radiation, similar to smoke from an extinguished flame. Astronomers call such traces «light echoes». Shapiro discovered the remnants of the black hole by searching for traces of supernovae in space.
«There are these outer regions of gas that are ionized by the supermassive black hole, which leads to this echo», — Shapiro explains.
It all started when he was looking at the DECaPS2 survey — a survey of the southern plane of the Milky Way galaxy taken with the Dark Energy Camera mounted on the 4-meter Victor Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Shapiro was looking for debris from exploding stars in the remnants of supernovae and planetary nebulae.
After examining one of these objects, the young astronomer noticed that its structure did not contain thin filaments that are typical of supernova remnants. In addition, there were no signs of a supernova in the center of the object. In view of this, Shapiro concluded that he had stumbled upon remnants of a black hole, which once exploded and left behind clouds of ionized gas
The object, which Shapiro believes to be the remnants of a black hole, is located in a field of potential supermassive black holes. The student used measurements from the Large South African Telescope to find the presence of oxygen and ionized sulfur scattered across the area, indicating a large-scale explosion. This demonstrates that the object discovered by the high school student is the remnants of a black hole that once emitted radiation and ionized nearby gas clouds, which still send radioactive radiation into space after the black hole itself exploded.
Shapiro believes that the diameter of the echo of a black hole is about 150-250 thousand light-years across, which is about 1.5-2 times the width of the Milky Way galaxy. As the high school student continues to study the light echo, he hopes to learn more about its composition by measuring its various regions.
«My involvement in this field of research came as a bit of a surprise. But I hope that this object, in particular, will help to expand our knowledge of galactic activity, which we do not have a very deep understanding of», — Shapiro said.
Source: LiveScience