A supermassive black hole devours a star, throws its remains to Earth
A supermassive black hole swallowed a star, tearing it apart and uniquely ejecting a beam of light from its center.
In a scientific research report published Wednesday, astronomers say a previously unknown black hole was revealed to observers when a star passed too close and was devoured.
Astronomers then observed a stream of “afterglow” from the catastrophe, which experts call a tidal disruption event (TDE), heading straight ahead. towards Earth
“The event began when an unlucky star approached the supermassive black hole (SMBH) on a near-parabolic trajectory and was torn apart in a stream of gaseous debris,” says the Science paper, published on November 30. “About half of the mass remained bound to the black hole, underwent general relativistic apsidal precession as the gas fell toward the pericenter, and then produced strong shocks at the self-crossing point.”
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Scientists said the projected beam – AT2022cmc, or an “infrared/optical/ultraviolet light curve” – was initially red before decaying over four days and changing to a blue hue.
The astronomers added: “Optical and ultraviolet observations revealed a rapidly fading red ‘flare’ that rapidly transitioned to a slow blue ‘plateau’, allowing the study of two components generated by tidal disruption: the relativistic jet and the thermal component of bound stellar debris accreting to the black hole.”
The explosive debris was so powerfully bright that astronomers detected the TDE from the dwarf galaxy a million light years away.
The paper added: “Observations of a bright counterpart at other wavelengths, including X-ray, submillimetre and radio, support the interpretation of AT2022cmc as an injected TDE containing a synchrotron” .
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The TDE was discovered in February 2022, before the journal Science News received the paper on it in April 2022, and the research was finally accepted in October 2022.
TDEs have been observed before, such as AT 2020neh in June 2020.
The Herschel Space Observatory has shown that galaxies with the most powerful, active, supermassive black holes at their cores produce fewer stars than galaxies with less active black holes.
(Universal History Archive/Universal Image Group via Getty Images)
Co-author Ryan J. Foley, an astronomer at UC Santa Cruz, said this initial discovery would pave the way for astronomers to find other TDEs and new dwarf galaxies.
“This discovery has created widespread excitement because we can use tidal disruption events not only to find more intermediate mass. black holes in quiescent dwarf galaxies, but also to measure their masses,” Foley said in a co-published Science paper on 10 November.
The discovery spanned years of research, as the distant galaxy was first observed in June 2020 and confirmed with data from the Young Supernova Experiment. It was observed again from July 1, 2020 to July 17, 2020; after August 5, 2020 to September 6, 2020.
“Over 24 months of YSE operations we observed only one AT 2020neh-like event, monitoring fields for approximately 6 months each. This equates to one event per year within the YSE observing volume” , says the scientific article.
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These unique discoveries could lead to even more discoveries in distant galaxies that would otherwise be undetectable without the visible light from the explosion.
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