This artist’s impression shows what it might look like when a star gets too close to a black hole, as the star is compressed by the black hole’s intense gravity. Some of the material is sucked into the star and orbits the black hole to form the disk seen in this image. On rare occasions, like this one, jets of matter and radiation shoot out from the black hole’s poles. (ESO, M. Kornmesser via Reuters)
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Astronomers have detected an act of extreme violence across more than half of the known universe, in which a black hole tore apart a star that was getting too close to this celestial monstrosity. But this was no ordinary example of a voracious black hole.
This was one of four examples – and the first since 2011 – of a black hole seen tearing apart a passing star in a so-called tidal disruption event and then shooting high-energy luminous particles in opposite directions into space as a result. . for researchers. It was the farthest and brightest event ever.
Astronomers described the event in studies published Wednesday in the journals Nature and Nature Astronomy.
The culprit appears to be a supermassive black hole hundreds of millions of times the mass of our Sun, located about 8.5 billion light-years from Earth. A light year is the distance that light travels in one year, or 5.9 trillion km.
“We think the star was similar to our sun, perhaps more massive but of the common type,” said astronomer Igor Andreoni of the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and author of one of the studies.
This event was detected in February by the Zwicky Transient Facility astronomical survey using a camera attached to a telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California. The distance was calculated using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.
“When a star gets dangerously close to a black hole – don’t worry, it won’t happen to the sun – it is violently torn apart by the black hole’s gravitational tidal forces – similar to the way the moon pulls tides on Earth, but with a force even greater,” said Michael Coughlin, a scientist and astronomer at the University of Minnesota and co-author of the study.
Parts of the star are then captured in a rapidly spinning disk that orbits the black hole. Finally, the black hole consumes what is left of the exhausted star in the disk. In some very rare cases, which we estimate to be a hundred times rarer and more powerful, jets of matter are fired in opposite directions when a tidal disturbance occurs.”
It’s likely that the black hole is spinning rapidly, Andreoni and Coughlin said, which could help explain how the two powerful jets hurtle through space at nearly the speed of light.
MIT astronomer Dheeraj Pasham, lead author of the other study, said the researchers were able to observe the event very early, less than a week after the black hole started gobbling up the star.
While researchers detect tidal disturbance events about twice a month, those that produce jets are extremely rare. One of this black hole’s jets appears to be heading towards Earth, making it appear brighter than if it were pointing in another direction – an effect called “Doppler amplification” and is similar to the enhanced sound of a passing police siren.
Supermassive black hole is believed to be at the center of a galaxy, just like the Milky Way and most galaxies have a hole in their core. But the tidal disturbance event was so bright that it blocked out the light from the galactic star.
“At its peak, the source looked brighter than 1,000 trillion suns,” Basham said.
