NASA — It seems the cosmos comes with its own light switch. About 500 million light years away, an unfortunate star the size of our sun was sucked into a small black hole, robbing it of all its light.
Astronomers discovered the situation because they saw a brilliant flash of light accompanying the event. These flashes appear to erupt when the star’s material is devoured by a black hole, then shine brightly for seven to 10 days before stopping suddenly, like flipping a light switch. Almost a month later, the black hole attacked the star again.
First recorded in June 2022 by the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory l space telescope, this observation shows a white dwarf star named Swift J0230, releasing mass parallel to three times the mass of Earth every time it passes near a black hole. Astronomers call this process a tidal disruption event, only about 100 events like this are known to date.
It is not unusual for stars to be partially torn apart by the behavior of such black holes. Previous research suggests such semi-deaths are more common than complete disintegrations. However, previous explosions occurred every few hours or once a year. The research team’s new observations provide a middle ground, different from the usual.
“Swift J0230 is an exciting addition to the class of partially perturbed stars because it shows us that these two classes of objects that have been discovered are truly connected, with our new system giving us the missing link,” said Rob Eyles-Ferris, one one research associate at the University of Leicester, England, as reported Space.comlast week.
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The research team calls Swift J0230 an accidental discovery. This is because previous observations between December 2021 and January 2022 did not detect this disturbing event. After its initial detection in June, regular observations of Swift J0230 revealed a rapid decline in the star’s brightness on its fourth day.
According to the new study, it was at that point that it dimmed by 20 percent in just 57 kiloseconds (15.8 hours). Soon, the star became difficult to see with telescope observations.
The team’s best guess is that Swift J0230 is close to the center of the galaxy, because that’s where black holes usually reside. However, it should be noted that the place thought to be the location of the star also coincides with the location of the Type-II supernova discovered in 2020.
The team also hasn’t completely ruled out the possibility that what they saw was actually a starburst. “It is difficult to see how a supernova could have evolved into the object we detected,” the researchers wrote.
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The black hole part of this equation is at the center of a galaxy called 2MASX J02301709+2836050, a small galaxy with a mass of about 10,000 to 100,000 times the mass of the Sun. For comparison, the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is 4 million times more massive than our sun, and many other black holes lurking in the depths of space have masses around 100 million times the mass of the sun.
This new research, which marks the first time a star the size of our sun has been torn apart, shows how relatively small black holes are hungry cosmic monsters. However, why he bothers only a part of the stars, it is still not well understood.
Most current research into disruptive events focuses on a star’s distance from a black hole as the primary determinant of the extent to which the star is torn apart. To learn more, a different team of astronomers in 2021 has used supercomputers to simulate how eight types of stars are distorted as they approach supermassive black holes.
2023-09-14 13:38:00
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