NASA just revealed a close-up view of a black hole devouring a star – Teach me about Science

Multiple NASA telescopes have recently observed a massive black hole tearing apart an unlucky star. A disk of hot gas revolves around a black hole in this illustration. (Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech).

It was a catastrophically ordinary day in space when a star got too close to a black hole that, unfortunately, it was pulled into the gravitational well. NASA telescopes captured the moment. The observations can help scientists understand more complex black hole feeding behaviors.

NASA has recently directed the gaze of its observatories to a black hole – located 250 million light years away – that is tearing apart a star. The colossal black hole resting at the heart of a relatively nearby galaxy is the fifth-closest example of a star-destroying black hole ever observed.

“Tidal disturbances are a kind of cosmic laboratory,” Suvi Gezari said in a statement, astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and co-author of the study. “They are our window into a real-time feed from a huge black hole lurking in the center of a galaxy.”

About 300 days after detecting the phenomenon, NASA’s NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescopic Array) telescope began to observe the system called AT2021ehb. The black hole in question is so big that it is 10 million times the size of our Sun, so to give you an idea, it would be about the difference between a bowling ball and the Titanic. During this tidal disturbance (informally known as the destruction of a star by a black hole), the side of the star closest to the black hole was pushed with more force than the side farthest from the star, pulling the whole thing apart and leaving nothing. More than a long noodle of hot gas, that’s just what astronomers know as spaghetting.

The intense gravity of the black hole completely ripped the star apart, at the end of the scene astronomers observed a spectacular increase in high-energy X-ray light. The substantial increase in brightness revealed how as stellar material was dragged toward its doom, it formed an extremely hot structure above the black hole called the corona.

NuSTAR is the most sensitive space telescope capable of observing these wavelengths of light, and the proximity of the event provided unprecedented insight into the formation and evolution of the corona. This shows how the destruction of a star by a black hole could be used to better understand what happens to the material that gets trapped, the researchers say.

“We’ve never seen a tidal disturbance with X-ray emission like this without the presence of a jet, and that’s really spectacular because it means we can potentially figure out what causes jets and what causes coronas,” said Yuhan Yao, a student graduate of Caltech in Pasadena, California, and lead author of the new study. “Our observations of AT2021ehb are consistent with the idea that magnetic fields have something to do with how the corona forms, and we want to know what causes that magnetic field to be so strong.”

The event was first detected on March 1, 2021 by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), located at the Palomar Observatory in southern California. Subsequently, it was studied by NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) telescope (which observes longer X-ray wavelengths than Swift).

The findings have been published in Astrophysical Journal.

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