Astronomers from the United States have found that the mass of a black hole can be determined by its relationship with the light it emits. An article by scientists describing the method was published in the journal Science.
Supermassive black holes have weights from one hundred to a million solar. They are usually located in the centers of galaxies and emit practically no light – they can only be detected by gravitational effects – except in cases of accretion, feeding interstellar gas and matter from nearby stars. In such cases, black holes emit light in the visible and ultraviolet ranges at regular intervals – from several hours to several decades.
Astrophysicists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign compiled a database of 67 actively accreting supermassive black holes and found that the graph of the emission of light by black holes closely correlates with their mass: the frequency of damping of oscillations is proportional to it. A similar relationship was found for white dwarfs – much less massive remnants of stars.
According to astronomers, the emission of light is associated with random fluctuations during the accretion process. The researchers hope that the correlations they found can also reveal patterns of light emission from medium-mass black holes, a class of objects that are still difficult to detect.
