NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope A star’s final moments as it is devoured by a black hole have been recorded in detail.
The agency said the operation transformed the star into a donut.
When a star gets close enough, the black hole’s gravitational grip violently tears it apart, releasing intense radiation in what’s called a “tidal disruption event.”
Astronomers are using the telescope to better understand what’s going on, using its strong ultraviolet sensitivity to study the light from the “star-gnawing event” AT2022dsb.
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This sequence of artists’ illustrations shows how a black hole can devour an orbiting star. 1. An ordinary star passes near a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy. 2. Gases outside the star are drawn into the gravitational field of the black hole. 3. A star gets ripped apart when tidal forces pull it away. 4. The stellar remnants are pulled into a doughnut-like ring around the black hole and will eventually fall into the black hole, emitting a massive amount of light and high-energy radiation.
(Credits: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI))
The star is located 300 million light-years away in the heart of galaxy ESO 583-G004.
Astronomers have detected about 100 tidal disturbance events around black holes using various telescopes.
The agency recently reported that another such event was detected by a high-powered space observatory in March 2021.
The star’s outer gases are drawn into the black hole’s gravitational field.
(Credits: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI))
“We’re excited that we can get these details of what the wreckage is doing. Tidal events can tell us a lot about a black hole,” Emily Engelthaler, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian, in a statement.
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for any galaxy with A supermassive black hole is at rest In the mean, stellar ripping is estimated to happen only a few times every 100,000 years.
This AT2022dsb event was first detected on March 1, 2022 by the All-Sky Instrument Survey of Supernovae, an array of ground-based telescopes.
The stellar remnants are pulled into a doughnut-like ring around the black hole and will eventually fall back into the black hole, emitting a massive amount of light and high-energy radiation.
(Credits: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI))
The collision was close enough to Earth and bright enough for ultraviolet spectroscopy over a longer period of time than usual.
“Normally, these events are hard to notice. You may get some feedback early in the disturbance when it’s really bright. Our program differs in that it is designed to look at some tidal events over the course of a year. to see what’s going on,” said Peter Maksim of the Center for Astrophysics. “We saw this early enough to be able to observe it in very intense black hole accretion phases. We saw the rate of accumulation decrease as it trickled down over time.”
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Data are interpreted as coming from the donut shape The gas region that was once a star.
The region is known as the ring, and it orbits a black hole in the centre.