NASA Hubble Space Telescope recorded the final moments of a star in detail when it was devoured by a black hole.
The agency said the process twisted the star into a donut shape in the process.
When a star gets close enough, the black hole’s gravitational grip violently rips it apart, spewing intense radiation in what’s known as a “tidal disruption event.”
Astronomers are using the telescope to better understand what’s going on, using its powerful ultraviolet sensitivity to study the light from the “stellar cooling event” AT2022dsb.
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This sequence of artist illustrations shows how a black hole can devour a star it overlooks. 1. A normal star passes close to a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. 2. The outer gases of the star are pulled into the gravitational field of the black hole. 3. The star is crushed when tidal forces pull it apart. 4. Stellar remnants are drawn into a donut-shaped ring around the black hole and will eventually fall into the black hole, releasing an enormous amount of high-energy light and radiation.
(Credits: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI))
The star lies nearly 300 million light-years away at the core of the galaxy ESO 583-G004.
Astronomers have detected approximately 100 tidal disruption events around black holes 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.
(Credits: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI))
“We’re excited that we can get these details about what the debris is doing. The tidal event can tell us a lot about a black hole,” Emily Engelthaler, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian said in a statement.
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For any given galaxy with an inactive supermassive black hole in the center, stellar crushing is estimated to occur only a few times every 100,000 years.
This AT2022dsb event was first imaged on March 1, 2022 by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae, a network of ground-based telescopes.
Stellar remnants are drawn into a donut-shaped ring around the black hole and will eventually fall into the black hole, releasing an enormous amount of high-energy light and radiation.
(Credits: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI))
The collision was close enough to Earth and bright enough due to ultraviolet spectroscopy for a longer period of time than normal.
“Usually these events are hard to observe. Maybe you’ll get some observations at the beginning of the outage when it’s really bright. Our program is different in that it’s designed to look at a few tidal events over a year to see what It happens…,” explained Peter Maksym of the Center for Astrophysics. “We saw this early enough to be able to observe it in these very intense black hole accretion stages. We saw the accretion rate drop as it became a trickle over time.”
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Data is interpreted as coming from the donut shape area of gas that was once the star.
The area is known as a torus, revolving around a black hole in the middle.
