NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope A detailed record of the last moments of a star eaten by a black hole.
The agency said the process twisted the star into a doughnut-like shape in the process.
When the star gets close enough, the black hole’s gravity violently rips the black hole apart, releasing intense radiation known as a tidal rupture event.
Astronomers are using telescopes to better understand what happens, taking advantage of its strong ultraviolet sensitivity to study light from AT2022dsb’s “stellar eclipse event.”
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This series of artist illustrations shows how a black hole can devour a bypassing star. 1. A normal star passes by a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. 2. Gas outside the star is drawn into the gravitational field of the black hole. 3. Stars are shredded by tidal forces. 4. The stellar remnants are drawn into a donut-shaped ring around the black hole and eventually fall into the black hole, emitting vast amounts of light and high-energy radiation.
(Credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI))
The star lies at the center of galaxy ESO 583-G004, nearly 300 million light years away.
Using various telescopes, astronomers have detected about 100 tidal disruption events around the black hole.
The agency recently reported that the High Energy Space Observatory spotted another such event in March 2021.
Gas outside the star is drawn into the black hole’s gravitational field.
(Credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI))
Emily Engelthaler of the Center for Astrophysics said: Harvard and the Smithsonian said in a statement.
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for any galaxy Stationary supermassive black hole At the core, stellar breakup is estimated to occur only a few times every 100,000 years.
This AT2022dsb event was first captured on March 1, 2022 by the All-Sky Supernova Survey, a network of ground-based telescopes.
The stellar debris is drawn into a donut-shaped ring around the black hole and eventually falls into the black hole, emitting vast amounts of light and high-energy radiation.
(Credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI))
The impact was close enough to Earth and bright enough for UV spectroscopy over longer than usual time.
“Normally, these events are difficult to observe. During very bright periods when the turmoil is just beginning, there are probably some observations. It’s different in that it’s designed to observe events and see what happens,” explained Peter Maxim of the Center for Astrophysics. “This was seen early enough to be observable in the accretion stages of these very intense black holes. We found that the accretion rate decreased as it turned into a trickle over time.”
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The data is interpreted as coming from a donut shape A region of gas that was once a star.
This region, known as the torus, spirals around the central black hole.
