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A black hole in a galaxy not far from Earth gobbled up a star like a great exploding noodle, and astronomers got a front row seat for the action.
The “unfortunate star,” as the researchers called it in their paper, was orbiting in the dense core of a galaxy with the difficult name 2MASX J04463790-1013349 about 214 million years ago when it found itself on a doomed path. It had gotten too close to the galaxy’s central supermassive black hole. And that black hole stretched it out like spaghetti and swallowed it in one big gulp. (Scientists literally call this process “spaghetti”). The light from this act of stellar cannibalism reached Earth in 2019. Researchers have spotted events like this before, but never so soon after destruction and never so close. The black hole ate its fetid plasma dinner just 214 light-years from Earth.
“The idea of a black hole ‘sucking in’ a nearby star sounds like science fiction. But this is exactly what happens in a tidal disruption event,” Matt Nicholl, astrophysicist at the University of Birmingham and lead author of the paper , said in a statement.
The article was published today (October 12) in the magazine Monthly Notices from the Royal Astronomical Society.
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Spaghetti occurs due to roughness gravity increases as it approaches a large black hole. If you fell feet first into the gravity well of a black hole, at some point the gravity at your feet would be much stronger than the gravity at your head. I would stretch you until all your skin, skeleton, and guts looked like a long rope (or a really gross noodle). The same thing happens to stars when they plunge into supermassive black holes, which can be millions of times their mass.
Astronomers have never yet observed the initial stretching process itself, but this is the closest they have ever come. The wide-view telescopes detected a flash of light from the system, the signature of a “tidal disruption event.” When a star is torn apart, some of its innards end up in the disk of matter that swirls around the black hole and glow brightly before being swallowed. At the same time, clouds of dust and other materials shoot out into space, hiding regions of the black hole. Shortly after the first flash, telescopes around the world turned to see how it happened.
“Because we detected it early, we were able to see the curtain of dust and debris that rose as the black hole launched a powerful outflow of material with speeds up to [6,200 miles per second] 10,000 kilometers per second]”study co-author Kate Alexander, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University, said in the statement.” This unique ‘peek behind the curtain’ provided the first opportunity to identify the origin of the obscured material and to follow in real time how it envelops the black hole. “
Over the course of six months, the researchers watched the material flow out into space and then watched the tidal disruption fade. Astronomers also confirmed for the first time the direct link between the flash of light and the material flowing out.
“The star was about the same mass as our own sun, and … it lost about half of that in the monstrous black hole, which is more than a million times more massive,” Nicholl said.
The researchers said the event, which they dubbed AT 2019qiz, could help them uncover secrets of darker tidal disruption events around other black holes and understand how extreme gravity from black holes warps matter in the surrounding space.
Originally posted on Live Science.
