Astronomers have observed a supermassive black hole with bad indigestion after tearing apart and eating a star.
A black hole at the center of a galaxy about 665 million light-years away from Earth has been caught regurgitating, or belching, star fragments nearly three years after swallowing a nearby star. Since they are not aware of any other star-swallowing hole since then, the October 2018 meal must have come back to haunt it, scientists say.
For the first time, researchers have witnessed a black hole with material lingering after the party. The discovery published last week Journal of Astrophysics.
“It’s as if this black hole suddenly started throwing out a bunch of material from the star it ate years ago,” said Yvette Cendes, lead author of the study at Harvard and the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. in the statement.
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“It’s like this black hole just started throwing out a bunch of material from the star it ate years ago.”
Black holes are one of the most difficult things space. The most common type is called star black hole, often thought to be the result of a giant star dying in a supernova explosion. The star’s material then collapses in on itself, compacting it into a relatively small area.
But how? supermassive black holes like this – millions and billions of times It is bigger than the sun— the shape is even more mysterious. Many astrophysicists and cosmologists believe that these behemoths are hidden in the center of almost all galaxies. recently Hubble Space Telescope observations have strengthened the theory that supermassive black holes start in the dusty cores of starburst galaxies, where new stars are quickly extinguished, but scientists are still figuring it out.
Black holes do not have surfaces like planets or stars. Instead, they have a boundary called the “event horizon,” a point of no return. If something gets too close, it will fall in. Scientists have long believed that once material is absorbed, it can never escape the hole’s gravity.
But if the black hole is claimed to be a cast iron stomach, how will it drop the pieces of its food?
The first real image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
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In fact, astronomers say that black holes immediately emit light as they eat a star, but they liken it to holes losing their mouths as gravitational forces stretch the star into a heated spiral. This activity creates a glow that astronomers observe with telescopes.
What surprised them is the fact that this star does not sit well with the black hole for a long time. Researchers have investigated these phenomena radio telescopes For more than a decade, Harvard astronomy professor and co-author Edo Berger said.
“There was radio silence in this case for the first three years,” Berger said in a statement. “And now it has dramatically brightened to become one of the brightest radios ever observed.”
The discovery suggests that the delayed outflow of light from a black hole after swallowing a cosmic object may occur more often than previously thought.
