Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —
Space Telescope Hubble captures the phenomenon of a black hole in the middle of ‘cooking’ a nearby star to produce a given giant plasma.
A supermassive black hole 300 million light years from Earth at the core of the galaxy ESO 583-G004 appears to entangle and tear the star apart after it gets too close.
This phenomenon sends out strong ultraviolet light that astronomers use to find these locations.
The black hole’s immense gravity exerts strong tidal forces on the star. The closer to the belly of the black hole, the more the star area is affected by the black hole’s gravity.
Reported LiveScience, this disparity, aka gravitational gap, rolls stars into long ropes like noodles wrapped around a black hole layer by layer. This phenomenon can be likened to spaghetti rolled by a fork or as it is popularly called spaghettification.
This gives a dramatic picture of the process. The outer atmosphere of the star is stripped first. The stellar matter then surrounds the black hole to form a tight ball of threads. The remaining part of the star immediately follows, accelerating around the black hole.
This hot plasma donut rapidly accelerates around the black hole and spirals into a colossal beam of energy and matter. This produces a distinctive bright flash that can be detected by a variety of telescopes, from optical telescopes to X-rays to radio waves.
The extraordinary brightness of these black hole devouring sessions allows astronomers to study them for longer periods of time than usual.
The researchers say these observations may yield exciting new insights into the unfortunate star’s final hours.
“We’re looking somewhere on the edge of the donut,” said Peter Maksym, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. NASA.
“We saw the stellar wind from the black hole sweeping across the surface projected towards us at 20 million miles per hour (three percent the speed of light). We are really still focusing on the event,” he added.
(lom/arh)
