Loading…
Astronomers witness a medium-sized black hole, trapping and tearing apart nearby moving stars. Illustration laboratory / scientific communication / live science
Astronomers spotted the flare, dubbed AT 2020neh, using the Young Supernova Experiment, a telescope in Hawaii that detects short bursts of cosmic events such as supernova explosions. The researchers describe their discovery of the event Nov. 10 in the journal Nature Astronomy.
A medium-sized black hole, located 850 million light-years from Earth in the galaxy SDSS J152120.07+140410.5. These observations may help astronomers understand how supermassive black holes form.
Read also; Researchers find the closest black hole to Earth
“The fact that we were able to capture a medium-sized black hole as it gobbled up a star gives us an amazing opportunity to detect what has been hidden so far,” said Charlotte Angus, an astrophysicist at the University of Copenhagen. /2022).
Black holes are ferocious eaters of stars in space. When a black hole devours a star, it produces a phenomenon called a Tidal Disruption Event (TDE), formed by the black hole’s enormous gravitational pull as it devours an otherwise helpless star.
Once caught in the black hole’s gravity, a star will wobble closer and closer to the voracious giant circle before being stripped and stretched layer by layer as it falls inside. This process turns the star into a long, hot, paste-like plasma that wraps around the black hole like spaghetti around a fork.
The process causes the plasma to accelerate, transforming it into a huge beam of energy and matter that produces a characteristic bright flash. Astronomers can then detect these flashes using optical telescopes, X-rays and radio waves.
Read also; Scientists are looking for ways to convert the black hole’s energy into electricity
“We can use the properties of the flares themselves to better understand this elusive group of middle-class black holes. These observations can explain most of the black holes at the center of the galaxy,” Angus said.
The newly identified black hole is rare because it is medium-sized, falling into the category of black holes with a mass between 100 and 10,000 times that of the sun. Scientists believe this intermediate singularity gobbles up gas, dust, stars and even other black holes to eventually transform into a supermassive black hole.
Supermassive black holes, which are often millions or even billions of times more massive than the sun. It acts as an anchor for the long matter swirling in orbit around it.
(wib)
