The telescope has received a rare light flash from a dead star as it was ripped apart by a supermassive Black hole.
This is a rare “tidal disturbance phenomenon” – Which creates sphagnification The stars as they pull and pull – is one of the closest known phenomena to form from Earth in just 215 million light-years. (For comparison, the nearest star system to Earth – Alpha Centauri – About 4 light-years away, and is a galaxy Approximately 200,000 light years in diameter.) A light-year means that light travels a distance of about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers) in a year.
“The idea of ’sucking’ a star near a black hole sounds like science fiction, but the same thing happens in a tidal disturbance event,” said Matt Nicole, lead author of the new study, a lecturer and research fellow at the Royal Astronomical Society at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. The European Southern Observatory said in a statement. Researchers captured the event using a number of telescopes, including ESO’s very large telescope and the new Technol .G telescope.
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“When an unfortunate star wanders near a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy, the extreme gravity of the black hole pulls the star into thin streams of matter,” co-author Thomas Weavers said in the same statement. Weavers is an ESO Fellow in Santiago, Chile and was at the Astronomy Institute at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom when he worked.
These events have been difficult to see in the past because lifting a star through a black hole tends to shoot material from a dead star, such as dust, which obscures the view, ESO officials said. Fortunately, the newly studied event was studied immediately after the star was cut.
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Researchers studied a phenomenon known as the AT 2019 quiz, when the flames became brighter in six months and then faded. Observations were made in ultraviolet, optical, X-ray and radio wavelengths. This widespread view of the event showed how the material leaves the star and the star ignites like its dying buffalo, the researchers said.
The team also estimated the size of the doomed star based on the same mass as our own sun. It had no chance against a black hole, which is more than 1 million times larger than the Sun.
The team also said that the AT 2019 Quiz also acts as a bellwetter to learn how matter behaves in the extreme atmosphere surrounding supermassive black holes. A study based on this research was published in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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