Ugo Black hole It was observed ejecting a star that had been eaten three years ago, baffling astronomers with delayed intergalactic indigestion.
“This really surprised us: no one had ever seen anything like it,” said Yvette Sendez, lead author of the new study analyzing the unprecedented phenomenon. He said.
In October 2018, astronomers witnessed a young star being torn apart and swallowed as it wandered near a black hole in a galaxy 665 million light-years from Earth. According to the research It was published last week in The Astrophysical Journal.
And the study found that violent orgies themselves were nothing unusual when, when a black hole mysteriously began emitting stellar matter in June 2021, scientists were baffled, because there was no evidence that it had eaten a other star.
“It’s as if this black hole suddenly started spitting up a lot of material from the star it ate years ago,” added Cendez, a research associate at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
A black hole is a region of space where gravity has dragged matter into a small space with so much force that nothing can escape it, including light.
They are usually formed from the collapsed remains of a large dying star and can eat anything very close, explains NASA.
The Center for Astrophysics explains that when a black hole devours a star, part of the celestial matter that makes up the star is sometimes ejected into space, which astronomers equate to a black hole as a chaotic eater.
But this process – which is Cendes’ equivalent of “burping” after a meal – usually occurs immediately, not three years later, according to the study.
The researchers rushed to study the surprising discovery using telescopes on three continents and in space.
They found that the black hole, dubbed AT2018hyz, ejects material at half the speed of light, five times faster than normal.
However, they’re not sure why the “Burp” star took three years to complete.
“This is the first time we’ve seen such a long delay between feeding and outflow,” said Ido Berger, professor of astronomy at Harvard and CfA, and co-author of the new study.
“The next step is to explore whether this is actually happening more regularly and we haven’t seen TDEs late enough in their development.”
The team hopes this research will help scientists better understand the eating behavior of black holes.
