NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope He recorded in detail the final moments of a star eaten by a black hole.
The agency said the process turned the star into a ring-like shape.
When a star gets close enough, the black hole’s gravitational grasp violently shatters it and spews out intense radiation in what’s known as the “tidal disruption event.”
Astronomers are using the telescope to better understand what’s going on, and are using its strong ultraviolet sensitivity to study light from the AT2022dsb “star eating event.”
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This series of artist’s drawings shows how a black hole can swallow a passing star. 1. A normal star passes by a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. 2. The outer gases of the star are drawn into the gravitational field of the black hole. 3. The star shatters as tidal forces tear it apart. 4. The stellar remnants are pulled into an annular ring around the black hole and eventually fall into the black hole, releasing enormous amounts of light and high-energy radiation.
(Credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI))
The star is located in the core of galaxy ESO 583-G004, about 300 million light-years away.
About 100 tidal disturbance events around black holes have been detected by astronomers using various telescopes.
The agency recently reported that a high-energy space observatory detected another similar event in March 2021.
The outer gases of the star are drawn into the gravitational field of the black hole.
(Credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI))
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian said in a statement.
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for any galaxy and motionless supermassive black holes In the center, stellar fragmentation is estimated to occur only a few times every 100,000 years.
This AT2022dsb event was first captured by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae, a network of ground-based telescopes, on March 1, 2022.
The stellar remnants are pulled into a donut-shaped ring around the black hole and eventually fall into the black hole, releasing enormous amounts of light and high-energy radiation.
(Credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI))
The collision was close enough to Earth and bright enough due to ultraviolet spectroscopy for a longer-than-normal period.
“Usually, these events are difficult to observe. At the start of the decay, when it’s really bright, you might get a few observations. The difference with our program is that it’s designed to look at several tidal events over the course of a year to see what happens,” explained Peter Maksym of the Center for Astrophysics. “We saw this early enough that we were able to observe it during these very dense black hole accretion phases. We saw that the rate of accumulation decreased as it turned into a trickle over time.”
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The data is interpreted as coming from a ring shape. gas field that was once a star.
The field is known as a torus revolving around a black hole in the middle.
