This artist’s impression shows what it might look like when a star gets too close to a black hole, as the star is compressed by the black hole’s intense gravity. Some material is sucked in by the star and orbits the black hole to form the disk seen in this image. On rare occasions, like this one, jets of matter and radiation shoot out from the black hole’s poles. (ESO, M. Kornmesser via Archyde.com)
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Astronomers have detected an act of extreme violence across more than half of the known universe, in which a black hole shredded a star that was wandering too close to this celestial monstrosity. But this was no ordinary example of a voracious black hole.
This was one of four examples — and the first since 2011 — of a black hole seen ripping apart a passing star in a so-called tidal disruption event and then shooting luminous, high-energy particles in opposite directions into space, accordingly. for researchers. It was the farthest and most brilliant event ever.
Astronomers described the event in studies published Wednesday in the journals Nature and Nature Astronomy.
The culprit appears to be a supermassive black hole hundreds of millions of times the mass of our Sun located about 8.5 billion light-years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in one year, or 5.9 trillion km.
“We think the star was similar to our sun, perhaps more massive but of the common type,” said astronomer Igor Andreoni of the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and an author of one of the studies.
This event was detected in February by the Zwicky Transient Facility astronomy survey using a camera attached to a telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California. The distance was calculated using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.
“When a star gets dangerously close to a black hole — don’t worry, it won’t happen to the sun — it is violently torn apart by the gravitational tidal forces of the black hole — similar to the way the moon pulls tides on Earth but with an even greater force,” said Michael Coughlin, a scientist. University of Minnesota astronomer and co-author of the study.
Parts of the star are then captured in a rapidly spinning disk that orbits the black hole. Finally, the black hole consumes what remains of the exhausted star in the disk. In some very rare cases, which we estimate are a hundred times rarer and more powerful, jets of matter are shot in opposite directions when a tidal disturbance occurs.”
The black hole is likely spinning rapidly, Andreoni and Coughlin said, which could help explain how the two powerful jets shoot out into space at nearly the speed of light.
MIT astronomer Dheeraj Pasham, lead author of the other study, said researchers were able to observe the event very early — less than a week after the black hole began devouring the star.
While researchers detect tidal disturbance events about twice a month, those that produce jets are extremely rare. One of the jets from this black hole appears to be heading toward Earth, making it appear brighter than if it were pointing in another direction – an effect called “Doppler amplification” and is similar to the enhanced sound of a passing police siren.
The supermassive black hole is believed to be at the center of a galaxy – just like the Milky Way and most galaxies have a hole in their core. But the tidal disturbance event was so bright that it blocked out the galactic star’s light.
“At its peak, the source seemed brighter than 1,000 trillion suns,” Basham said.