Will Dunham, Reuters
Artwork depicting a tidal disruption event (TDE) in which a star passes close to a supermassive black hole and is torn apart by its gravity.
photograph: Science Photo Library (via AFP)
- The black hole is 665 million light years from Earth
- Jets of matter are being shot into space from a black hole
- One of the most powerful single cosmic events ever observed
Scientists are observing the behavior of supermassive black holes that exhibit extremely promiscuous eating habits.
They are primarily using radio telescopes in New Mexico and South Africa to observe the black holes at the centers of galaxies far beyond the Milky Way. The black hole continues to spew out jets of fast-moving material after tearing apart and eating stars that get too close.
What makes this fatal stellar encounter unusual is the intensity and duration of the black hole’s post-eclipse indigestion.
The material left behind from the star began flying out into space two years after the black hole’s gravity chopped it into its constituent gas.
The jet has now been hurtling toward space for six years, longer than previously observed, continuing to intensify what has become one of the most powerful single events ever detected in the universe.
“The exponential rise in brightness of this source is unprecedented,” said Yvette Sendes, an astrophysicist at the University of Oregon and lead author of the study published Thursday. astrophysical journal.
“It’s about 50 times brighter than when it was first discovered, which is incredibly bright for an object in the radio waves. This has been going on for years and shows no signs of stopping.”
“That’s super rare.”
A black hole is an extremely dense celestial body with a gravitational force so strong that not even light can escape. This black hole is located approximately 665 million light years away from Earth.
One light year is the distance that light travels in one year, which is 9.5 trillion km.
The mass of a black hole is about 5 million times that of the sun. This makes it roughly comparable to the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, which has a mass about 4 million times that of our sun.
This fateful star was a type called a “red dwarf” with a mass about one-tenth that of the Sun.
The event horizon is the point of no return for matter pulled by the black hole’s gravity. When a star is pulled apart by a black hole, it is called a tidal disruption phenomenon because it results from the same gravitational dynamics that cause ocean tides on Earth.
“Any object that gets too close to a black hole’s event horizon risks being torn apart by tidal forces and stretched into long streams of debris, a process called ‘spaghettification,'” said Kate Alexander, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona and study co-author.
“After the star was torn apart, some of this gas fell toward the black hole, heated, and the black hole began to consume the star. The bright radio light we see in our telescopes is produced by material in the star that approached the event horizon but never actually crossed it. It’s like a picky baby chewing food and violently spitting it out instead of swallowing it.”
Researchers don’t know exactly why the jet’s tidal disruption, officially called the relativistic jet, is so spectacular.
“We don’t really know what causes relativistic jets in the first place, but it’s an active area of research,” Sendes said. “Perhaps it has something to do with the magnetic field around the black hole, but clearly it must be something unusual, otherwise we would see more.”
The question now is how long this jet injection will last. Researchers believe it could reach a peak later this year or next year.
“After reaching its peak, it should slowly fade away, so we’ll probably still be able to see it for at least 10 years,” Alexander said.
– Reuters