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Scientists predict that the white dwarf will slowly lose its mass as it orbits the black hole, until it shrinks by a trillion years to the size of Jupiter.
In the cosmic neighborhood, in a galaxy some 250 million light years from Earth, a star managed to survive a very close encounter with a black hole, although it will continue to orbit without a chance of escape, scientists revealed after analyzing the Observatory data. X-ray Chandra from NASA and XMM-Newton from ESA.
The black hole in question, located in a galaxy called GSN 069, has a mass 400,000 times greater than that of the Sun, Which makes it relatively small by the standards of supermassive black holes.
After being captured by the gravity of the black hole, the star, a red giant, stripped of its outer layers of hydrogen, leaving only its core, like a white dwarf.
“In my interpretation of the X-ray data, the white dwarf survived, but did not escape. Now it’s trapped in an elliptical orbit around the black hole, taking a trip around once every nine hours, ” explained Andrew King of the University of Leicester (UK).
Thus, the white dwarf completes its orbit almost three times a day, and meanwhile lets the black hole gradually extract its material on its closest approaches.
The researchers estimate that the combined effect of gravitational waves and an increase in the size of the star, as it loses mass, should cause the orbit to become more circular and grow in size. In this way, the white dwarf would slowly spiral away from the black hole.
“Will do everything possible to escape, but there is no escape. The black hole will eat it more and more slowly, but it will never stop. In principle, this loss of mass will continue even after the white dwarf is reduced to the mass of Jupiter, in about a billion years. This would be a remarkably slow and complicated way for the universe to make a planet, “said King.
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