Black holes are notoriously voracious objects, often swallowing up stars that are unfortunate enough to get too close to them and wiping them out with their immense gravity. But it turns out some people are more inclined to snack than gorge themselves.
Researchers say they observed a supermassive black hole at the center of a relatively nearby galaxy, devouring a star similar in size and composition to the sun, consuming the equivalent of about three times the mass of Earth each time the star approaches. . Deliver its elongated oval obituary.
Black holes are extremely dense objects whose gravitational pull is so strong that not even light can escape.
The star is about 520 million light-years away from our solar system. A light year is the distance that light travels in one year, or 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers). It has been observed being plundered by the supermassive black hole at the center of a spiral galaxy.
This one is relatively small for such black holes, estimated to be hundreds of thousands of times more massive than the Sun. The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way is called Sagittarius A*, and its mass is about 4 million times that of the sun. Some other galaxies host supermassive black holes with masses hundreds of millions of times that of the Sun.
Most galaxies have such black holes at their centers, and the environment around them can be one of the most violent places in the universe.
Much of the data scientists used in the new study came from NASA’s orbiting Neil Gurrs Swift Observatory.
The star is observed orbiting the black hole every 20 to 30 days. At one end of its orbit, it ventures close to the black hole, sucking or accreting some material from the star’s atmosphere with each pass, but not so close that it tears the entire star apart. Such events are known as “repeated partial tidal disruption”.
Star material falling into a black hole heats up to about 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit (2 million degrees Celsius), releasing large amounts of X-rays. These were detected by space observatories.
Rob Ayres-Ferris, an astrophysicist at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, said: “The most likely scenario is that the star’s orbit will gradually decay, and it will get closer and closer to the supermassive black hole, until it is close enough to completely destroyed.” said one of the authors of the study, published this week in the journal Nature Astronomy.
“This process will probably take at least several years, more likely decades or centuries,” Ayres-Ferris added.
This marks the first time scientists have observed a Sun-like star being repeatedly swallowed by a supermassive black hole.
“There are still a lot of unanswered questions about tidal disruption events and exactly how the orbits of stars affect them,” Ayers-Ferris said. “This is a very rapidly developing field at the moment. This field shows us that new discoveries can be made all the time. May appear.”
© Thomson Reuters 2023
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