Discovery of an “upside-down” black hole that astonishes NASA scientists

NASA researchers have combined years of data and new imaging techniques to better understand a “flipped” black hole moving in unexpected ways.

This black hole is located in a galaxy named NGC 5084, which has been known to researchers for several years, according to a NASA press release.

Innovative analysis techniques developed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California allowed scientists to observe four long jets of plasma emanating from this galaxy. The majority of galaxies do not have jets, and when they do, there are most often only one or two. These jets suggested the presence of a supermassive black hole within the galaxy. The observation of the two pairs forming an “X” structure prompted researchers to take a closer look at this region.

Using archived data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, the researchers found that the galaxy also has a “small dusty inner disk” rotating at its center, which again indicated the presence of a black hole. Surprisingly, the disk and black hole rotate at a 90-degree angle to the rest of the galaxy, meaning that these two features are “lying on their sides,” according to NASA.

“It was like observing a crime scene with several types of light,” said scientist Alejandro Serrano Borlaff, who will also publish a paper on the discovery, in the release. “Putting all the images together revealed that NGC 5084 has changed a lot recently.”

The reasons for this change in the galaxy are not yet clear. It could be a collision with another galaxy, which would have generated a conduit of superheated gas, thus creating the “X”-shaped plasma jets. Further research will be needed to better understand these circumstances.

“Detecting two pairs of X-ray jets in a single galaxy is exceptional,” Pamela Marcum, an astrophysicist at Ames and co-author of the discovery, said in the release. “The combination of their unusual cross-shaped structure and the ‘upside-down’ dusty disk gives us unique insights into the history of this galaxy.”