An Unusually Close Glimpse of Black Hole Snacking on Star is captured by NASA
Recently, a massive black hole tearing apart an unlucky star that wandered too close was seen by many NASA telescopes.
It was the fifth-closest example of a black hole destroying a star ever seen, and it was situated about 250 million light-years away from Earth in the center of another galaxy.
In this image, a disk of hot gas swirls around a black hole.
The stream of gas stretching to the right is what remains of a star that was pulled apart by the black hole.
Astronomers noticed a dramatic rise in high-energy X-ray light around the black hole after the star had been totally ruptured by the black hole's gravity.
A cloud of hot plasma (gas atoms with their electrons stripped away) above the black hole is known as a corona.
This showed that when the stellar material was drawn toward its destruction, it created a corona, an extremely hot structure above the black hole.
The process of the destruction of a star by a black hole is formally known as a tidal disruption event.
When a star wanders too close to a black hole, the intense gravity will stretch the star out until it becomes a long river of hot gas.
The gas is then whipped around the black hole and is gradually pulled into orbit, forming a bright disk.
Recent observations of a black hole eating a wandering star may aid scientists in better understanding more complex black hole feeding tendencies.
The new study focuses on an event termed AT2021ehb that occurred in a galaxy with a central black hole about 10 million times the mass of our Sun (about the difference between a bowling ball and the Titanic).
The side of the star closest to the black hole was dragged harder than the far side of the star during this tidal disruption event, stretching the entire thing apart and leaving nothing but a long noodle of hot gas.
The event was first spotted on March 1, 2021, by the ZTF (Zwicky Transient Facility), located at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California.
Then, around 300 days after, NASA’s NuSTAR began observing the system and detected a corona – a cloud of hot plasma.
More tidal disruption events identified by ZTF are being observed by many telescopes such as SWIFT, NICER and NuSTAR.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Full Image Details & Science Communication Lab/DESY