Scientists have spotted a black hole spewing matter three years after it shredded a star, and this type of phenomenon can usually be seen during the event, and Harvard researchers are still not sure why the delay occurred, as they watched the black hole for several months after it devoured the young star in 2018, But by chance they decided to reconsider it in 2021.
According to the British newspaper, “Daily Mail”, that was when they discovered radio waves that violently emit it, as if it were “expelling a group of material from the star that ate it years ago.”
“It totally surprised us,” said Yvette Sindez, an associate researcher at the Center for Astrophysics and lead author on the study of the event. “Nobody’s seen anything like this before.”
When a star gets very close to a black hole, it undergoes a process of “stretching”, where it is stretched vertically and compressed horizontally by a strong gravitational field.
These are known as tidal disturbance events, or TDEs, and they are known to emit light when they occur. This is because elongated material orbits around the black hole and heats up, creating a flash that astronomers can detect millions of light years away. A black hole cannot successfully consume it being occasionally pushed into space.