Baby black hole is swaddled in a supernova remnant

Flora Graham, editor, newscientist.com

(Image: X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/L.Lopez et al; infrared: Palomar; Radio: NSF/NRAO/VLA)

Congratulations - it's a black hole. The infinitely massive newborn is cradled in a colourful remnant of a supernova, and it looks like it's the youngest black hole in the Milky Way.

The supernova remnant, called W49B, was about a thousand years old when its light began its 26,000-light-year journey to Earth. This picture's colourful swirls come from a combination of X-rays from Chandra X-ray Observatory in blue and green, radio data from the Very Large Array in pink, and infrared data from Palomar Observatory in yellow.

But W49B is more than just a pretty picture - it's a highly unusual creature. For one, it's barrel-shaped, rather than spherical. Supernova explosions are generally symmetrical, with the stellar material blasting away more or less evenly in all directions. However, in W49B, material near the poles of the doomed star seems to have been ejected at a much higher speeds than material near its equator.

"W49B is the first of its kind to be discovered in the galaxy," says Laura Lopez, who led the study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It appears its parent star ended its life in a way that most others don't."

And there's another surprise lurking at W49B's core. Most of the time, supernovae leave a dense spinning core - a neutron star. But there's no sign of the X-ray or radio pulse evidence of a neutron star. Instead, the researchers are convinced that a black hole sits at the centre of W49B's cloud of gas and plasma.

"It's a bit circumstantial, but we have intriguing evidence the W49B supernova also created a black hole," says Daniel Castro, also of MIT. "If that is the case, we have a rare opportunity to study a supernova responsible for creating a young black hole."

Fancy ogling another gorgeous supernova? Read "Supernova-powered bow shock creates cosmic spectacle".

Journal reference: The Astrophysical Journal, DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/764/1/50

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