[ad_1]
The parents of this black hole never told him not to play with his food.
An astronomer believes he has seen a stellar corpse known as a white dwarf that sends out rays of light, signs of May from its awkward orbit near a black hole. And while a white dwarf is usually the result of a star running out of fuel and exploding, the scientist believes that the black hole itself snatched away all the free gas from a red giant, causing premature death. Such is the danger of stepping too close to a black hole, even if you can’t swallow it.
“In my interpretation of the X-ray data, the white dwarf survived, but did not escape,” Andrew King, author of the new research and astrophysicist at the University of Leicester in the UK, he said in a NASA statement. “It is now trapped in an elliptical orbit around the black hole, making a trip about once every nine hours.”
Video: Star captured by black hole gravity, shoots X-ray
Related: No escape: dive into a black hole (infographic)
King’s new research is based on observations collected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray Telescope. The couple focused on the drama unfolding in a galaxy called GSN 069, located about 250 million light years from Earth.
Every nine hours or so, the galaxy experiences an increase in X-ray emissions. In analyzing those spikes, King came up with his theory of an alleged near-fault tidal disruption event. (Scientists have studied many tidal disruption events, in which a black hole tears a star that gets too close.)
When a red giant first sneaked in too close, the black hole took all of its hydrogen away, leaving only the central white dwarf. But the black hole, which contains roughly 400,000 times the mass of the sun, a bit insignificant for a supermassive black hole, was unable to finish the job. Instead, it trapped the white dwarf in a dramatically nine-hour elongated orbit, and at the closest point in each loop, the black hole again absorbs a little more of the star’s matter, chewing on its food.
“It will do its best to escape, but there is no escape. The black hole will eat it more and more slowly, but it will never stop,” King said. Right now, he calculated, the star is about a fifth of the mass of our sun. But in about a billion years, if the dynamics continue, it could end up as a planet with about the same mass as Jupiter, he added. “This would be a remarkably slow and complicated way for the universe to make a planet!”
So far, these observations are quite rare, but the fact that scientists have caught the interaction suggests that such close faults may not be so.
“In astronomical terms, this event is only visible to our current telescopes for a short period of time, about 2,000 years,” said King. “So unless we have been extraordinarily lucky to have caught this one, many more may be missing.”
The research is described in an article published Feb. 7 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Email Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us On twitter @Spacedotcom and in Facebook.
[ad_2]
