The Hubble Space Telescope captured how a supermassive black hole destroyed a star that got too close. As a result, the remnants of the star have formed a huge ring in the shape of a torus or donut around the black hole and will now be gradually absorbed by it, accompanied by intense radiation.
The absorbed star was at a distance of almost 300 million light-years from the center of the studied galaxy. This powerful collision was close enough to Earth and bright enough that the Hubble team could conduct studies of the radiation spectrum of the absorbed star for a longer than usual period of time. The scientists used Hubble’s ultraviolet sensitivity for spectral analysis, which showed the presence of hydrogen, carbon and other elements.
Such events of destruction of stars by black holes are called “tidal destruction” by astronomers. “There are still very few such phenomena observed in ultraviolet light, given the time of observation. This is really unfortunate, because you can get a lot of information from ultraviolet spectra.”said Emily Engelthaler of the Center for Astrophysics at the Harvard and Smithsonian Institutions in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “We are excited because we can get these details about what the wreckage is doing. A tidal event can tell us a lot about a black hole. Changes in the state of a doomed star occur on the order of days or months.
The Hubble spectroscopic data are interpreted as coming from a very bright, hot torus-shaped gas formation that was once a star. This solar system-sized region orbits the black hole.
Astronomers using various telescopes have recorded about 100 tidal disruption events around black holes. NASA recently reported that as early as March 1, 2021, several of its high-energy space observatories detected a similar black hole tidal collapse event in another galaxy. Unlike the Hubble observations, the data was collected from the X-ray spectrum of the extremely hot corona that formed around the black hole from the remains of a destroyed star.
The results were presented at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington.
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