Death by Black Hole: Astronomers Frightened by Star’s “Spaghetification”

It is a popular misconception that black holes behave like cosmic vacuum cleaners, sucking anything around them wildly. In reality, only material beyond the event horizon, including light material, swallows and cannot escape, although black holes are also cluttered eaters. This means that part of an object’s object is actually ejected in a powerful jet.

If it is an object star, the process of slipping (or “spaghettiified”) by the powerful gravitational forces of a black hole takes place outside the event horizon, and part of the star’s core mass is violently pulled out. This in turn can create a rotating ring (aka an attraction disc) of matter around the black hole that emits powerful X-rays and visible light. That jet is an aircraft. Astronomers can indirectly estimate the presence of black holes. Now astronomers have recorded the final death of a star by a supermassive black hole in a similar “tidal disturbance event” (TDE), as described in a new paper published in the Royal Astronomical Society’s monthly journal Information Information.

“The idea of ​​a nearby star sucking a ‘black hole’ sounds like science fiction. But the same thing happens in a tidal disturbance event,” said Matt Nicole, co-author of the University of Birmingham. We were able to investigate in detail what happens when a star is eaten by a monster. “

Edo Berger of Harvard University’s Center for Astrophysics said, “The destruction of a star causes a tidal collapse that approaches a supermassive black hole.” “In this case, the star was feeding about half of its mass or was scattered in the sun’s ten million black holes and the other half was thrown out.”

Death by tidal forces

Stephen Hawking’s best-selling book of 1988, “Spaghettiized” after falling into a black hole, A brief history of time. Hawking imagined an unfortunate astronaut who went beyond the horizon of the event and would find himself subjected to the intense gravitational gradation of a black hole. (Gravitational gradient is the difference in the force of gravity of gravity depending on the direction of an object or object.)

If the astronaut falls in the first leg, for example, pulling will be stronger on the foot than the head. The astronaut vert will also be shortened in length and horizontally by the tidal forces of the black hole until they resemble a strand of spaghetti. From a physics point of view, this is the reason why the earth experiences tides: gravity pulls the oceans from the moon one way and flattens the other. At least it will be fast; The whole process will take less than a second.

All of this is perfectly predictable, subject to various thought experiments. But on the scale of stars and galaxies, a kind of spaghettiation is a real phenomenon, although it happens outside the horizon of a black hole phenomenon. Although only a few individuals have been found nowadays, these tidal disturbance events are likely to occur in our universe. Is normal.

For example, in 2018, astronomers announced the first direct image of a star cut through a black hole 20 million times more than our Sun, in a pair of colliding galaxies called Arp 299 about 150 million light-years from Earth. They use a combination of radio and infrared telescopes, including a very long baseline array (VLBA), the formation of which follows the expansion of the plane of the protruding object following a star cut through a supermassive black hole in the center of the star. One of the colliding galaxies.

However, these powerful bursts of light are always cut behind a curtain of dust and debris between the stars, making it difficult for astronomers to study them in more detail. This latest event (dubbed AT 2019 quiz) was found shortly after the stars were cut last year, making it easier to study in detail, before the veil of dust and debris was completely formed. Over the next six months, astronomers made observations on the electromagnetic spectrum, using multiple telescopes around the world, including a very large telescope (VLT) array located in Chile and the New Technol .G telescope (NTT).

Kate Alexander, co-author of Northwestern University, said, “Since we caught it early, we could really see the curtain of dust and debris being pulled as a powerful flow of material started through the black hole at speeds of up to 10,000 km / cm. Was done. ” “This is a unique ‘behind-the-scenes peek’ that provided the first opportunity to point to the origins of obscure material and to follow how black holes are embodied.”

According to Burger, these observations provide the first direct evidence that powerful optical and radio emissions are observed before the flow of gas during disruption and emission. “So far, the nature of these emissions has been heavily debated, but here we see that the two regimes are linked by the same process,” he said.

DOI: Monthly Instructions for the Royal Astronomical Society, 2020. 10.1093 / MNRS / STA 2827 (About DOI).

E.S.O. List of images by / m. Cornmeaser