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An extremely rare close call between a red giant star and a black hole has been captured by powerful NASA and ESA technology, revealing a key chapter in a cosmic saga that is likely to continue for a billion years.
The fatal celestial event is unfolding in the GSN 069 galaxy, some 250 million light years from Earth. The black hole in question is approximately 400,000 times the mass of the sun, making it small by supermassive black hole standards, but still terrifying in scale.
Meanwhile, the red giant, caught in the gravitational pull of the black hole, shed its outer layers of hydrogen, leaving only the core of the star, the white dwarf, to reveal its narrow escape here on Earth through explosions. from x -rays.
“In my interpretation of the X-ray data, the white dwarf survived, but did not escape.” said Andrew King of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, who studied the data from ESA and NASA. “It is now trapped in an elliptical orbit around the black hole, making a trip about once every nine hours.”
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In other words, the remaining white dwarf orbits its attacker three times a day, as the black hole separates each time the star gets too close.
Each time the black hole rips more matter from the star, it releases an explosion of X-rays visible by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton. In space, no one can hear you scream: they can only watch your passing 250 million light-years away.
The researchers also anticipate the release of gravitational waves from the black hole and the white dwarf as they continue their dance of death. Even though the star’s loss of mass will make its orbit round and expand, scientists predict only one result: a certain fate.
“He will do his best to escape, but there is no escape. The black hole will eat it more and more slowly, but it will never stop. “ said the king. “In principle, this loss of mass would continue until and even after the white dwarf was reduced to the mass of Jupiter, in approximately a billion years. This would be a remarkably slow and complicated way for the universe to make a planet!
Scientists have documented countless cases of star-ripping black holes, and have examined the aftermath, but there have been very few stories of semi-survival like this.
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While these near-fault events should be more common, there are several theories as to why we don’t encounter stellar survivors that often: or more of these big stars just take too long to complete their orbits around their black hole for us to be able to To witness X-ray bursts, or most black holes are just too big and too greedy, and don’t mess around with your ‘food’ for that long.
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