A rare ray of light emitted by a star when sucked into a super massive black holewas discovered by scientists with telescopes from around the world.
The phenomenon known as the tidal disturbance event is the closest flicker of its kind recorded to date and occurs only 215 million light years from Earth. It is caused when a star passes too close to a black hole and the black hole’s extreme gravitational pull breaks the star up into thin streams of material – a process known as “spaghettification”. During this process, some of the material falls into the black hole, releasing a bright beam of energy that astronomers can see.
Tidal disruption events are rare and not always easy to investigate as they are usually obscured by a curtain of dust and debris. An international team of scientists led by University of Birmingham were able to study this event in unprecedented detail as it was discovered only a short time after the star ripped apart.
Use of the European Southern Observatory Very large telescope Using the New Technology Telescope, the Las Cumbres Observatory’s global telescope network, and Neil Gehrel’s Swift Satellite, the team was able to monitor the torch, named AT2019qiz, over a six-month period as it brightened and then faded.
The results of the study will be published in Monthly releases from the Royal Astronomical Society. This was partially supported and funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).
“The idea that a black hole ‘sucks in’ a nearby star sounds like science fiction. However, this is exactly what happens during a tidal disturbance event, ”says lead author Dr. Matt Nicholl, senior lecturer and research fellow at the Royal Astronomical Society at the University of Birmingham. “We were able to examine in detail what happens when a star is eaten by such a monster.”
“When a black hole devours a star, it can trigger a strong shock of material outwards that obstructs our view,” explains Samantha Oates, also at the University of Birmingham. “This happens because the energy released when the black hole eats star material drives the star’s debris outward.”
In the case of AT2019qiz, astronomers were able to identify the phenomenon early enough to observe the entire process.
“Several sky surveys revealed emissions from the new tidal disruption event very quickly after the star was torn apart,” says Thomas Wevers, a ESO Fellow in Santiago, Chile who was working at the Department of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, UK when he led the work. “We immediately pointed a number of ground and space telescopes in that direction to see how the light was created.”
The prompt and extensive observations in ultraviolet, optical, X-ray and radio light showed, for the first time, a direct connection between the material emerging from the star and the bright torch emitted as it is engulfed by the black hole.
“The observations showed that the star was roughly the same mass as our own sun and lost about half of it to the black hole, which is over a million times more massive,” said Nicholl, who is also a visiting researcher at the University of Edinburgh.
“Because we saw it early on, we could actually see the curtain of dust and debris pull together as the black hole triggered a heavy flow of material at speeds of up to 10,000 km / s,” said Kate Alexander. NASA Einstein Fellow at Northwestern University in the USA. “This unique look behind the scenes provided the first opportunity to determine the origin of the opaque material and to see in real time how it is devouring the black hole.”
Research is helping astronomers better understand supermassive black holes and how matter behaves in the extreme gravity environments around them. The team says AT2019qiz could even act as a “Rosetta Stone” for interpreting future observations of tidal disturbance events. ESO’s Extrem Large Telescope (ELT), due to go live this decade, will allow researchers to spot increasingly weaker and faster evolving tidal disturbance events and solve other black hole physics puzzles.
For more about this research:
Reference: “A runoff drives the optical rise of the nearby, rapidly evolving tidal disturbance event AT2019qiz” by M. Nicholl, T. Wevers, SR Oates, KD Alexander, G. Leloudas, F. Onori, A. Jerkstrand, S. Gomez, S. Campana, I. Arcavi, P. Charalampopoulos, M. Gromadzki, N. Ihanec, PG Jonker, A. Lawrence, I. Mandel, S. Schulze, P. Short, J. Burke, C. McCully, D. Hiramatsu , DA Howell, C. Pellegrino, H. Abbot, JP Anderson, E. Berger, PK Blanchard, G. Cannizzaro, TW Chen, M. Dennefeld, L. Galbany, S. González-Gaitán, G. Hosseinzadeh, C. Insertra , I. Irani, P. Kuin, T. Müller-Bravo, J. Pineda, NP Ross, R. Roy, SJ Smartt, KW Smith, B. Tucker, yr Wyrzykowski and DR Young, October 12, 2020, Monthly announcements from the Royal Astronomical Society.
DOI: 10.1093 / mnras / staa2824