“Scientists Discover Closest Star-Eating Black Hole to Earth Ever Seen”

New News, Popular – Scientists recently discovered the closest star-eating black hole to Earth ever discovered. The supermassive black hole tore through the star at the center of galaxy NGC 7392. The flash of light from the black hole’s feeding finally reached Earth in 2014, and astronomers recently found it in their data.

Reported from Live Science, the most recent tidal fission event detected from the center of NGC 7392 is the closest example to date of a star being crushed by the immense gravitational pull of a black hole. The findings were published April 28 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The voracious black hole is visible about 137 million light years from Earth, or about 35 million times farther than Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the sun. As far-fetched as that sounds, astronomers have observed only about 100 events of this kind so far, and this one is four times closer than the previous closest event.

Scientists find these TDEs in infrared light, a different wavelength than most conventional TDE detections, which normally occur in X-rays, ultraviolet, and optical light.

Previously discovered TDEs mostly arise in so-called green galaxies, which do not create as many stars as the more active blue galaxies, but are not as completely exhausted in starmaking as red galaxies. NGC 7392, however, is a blue galaxy producing lots of new stars and creating lots of dust in the process. This dust can obscure the galactic center, home of supermassive black holes, in optical and ultraviolet light. But infrared light allows astronomers to peer through that dust and see what’s going on.

These findings suggest that astronomers should also look for TDEs in infrared light.

“Using infrared surveys to capture dust echoes from obscure TDEs has shown us that there are populations of TDEs in dusty star-forming galaxies that we have missed,” Suvi Gezari(opens in a new tab), astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute who does not involved in the research, said in the statement.

By searching for TDEs in the infrared as well, scientists can get one step closer to understanding how black holes eat stars.