This illustration shows a star (in the foreground) undergoing spaghettification while being sucked into a supermassive black hole (in the background) during a “tidal disturbance event”. In a new study carried out with the help of ESO’s Very Large Telescope and ESO’s New Technology Telescope, a team of astronomers found that a black hole, when engulfing a star, can trigger a powerful shock of material outward. Photo credit: ESO / M. Kornmesser
Use of telescopes from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and other organizations around the world, astronomers have discovered a rare ray of light from a star that was torn apart by a super massive black hole. The phenomenon known as the tidal disturbance event is the closest such flare to be recorded in just over 215 million light years from Earth and has been studied in unprecedented detail. The research is published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
With the help of telescopes from ESO and other organizations around the world, astronomers have discovered a rare beam of light from a star that is being torn apart by a supermassive black hole. This video summarizes the results. Photo credit: ESO
“The idea that a black hole ‘sucks in’ a nearby star sounds like science fiction. But that’s exactly what happens in a tidal disruption event, ”says Matt Nicholl, senior lecturer and research fellow at the Royal Astronomical Society University of Birmingham, UK, and the lead author of the new study. But these tidal disturbance events, where a star experiences something called spaghettification when sucked into a black hole, are rare and not always easy to study. The research team pointed out ESOs Very large telescope (VLT) and ESO’s New Technology Telescope (NTT) on a new flash of light that occurred near a supermassive black hole last year to investigate in detail what happens when a star is engulfed by such a monster.
Astronomers know what should theoretically happen. “If an unfortunate star wanders too close to a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy, the extreme gravitational pull of the black hole tears the star into thin streams of material,” explains study author Thomas Wevers, an ESO fellow in Santiago. Chile, who was at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, UK, when he was leading the work. As some of the thin strands of star material fall into the black hole during this spaghettification process, a bright beam of energy is released that astronomers can detect.
This animation shows a star undergoing spaghettification while being sucked into a supermassive black hole during a “tidal disturbance event”. In a new study conducted with the help of ESO’s Very Large Telescope and ESO’s New Technology Telescope, a team of astronomers found that a black hole, when engulfing a star, can trigger a powerful shock of material outward. Photo credit: ESO / M. Kornmesser
Though powerful and bright, astronomers have had difficulty studying this flash of light, often obscured by a curtain of dust and debris. Only now could astronomers shed light on the origin of this curtain.
“We have found that if a black hole devours a star, it can fire a powerful explosion 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 up star material drives the star’s debris outward.
This graphic shows the location of AT2019qiz, a tidal disruption event, in the constellation Eridanus. The map contains most of the stars that are visible to the naked eye in good conditions, and the location of AT2019qiz is indicated by a red circle. Photo credit: ESO, IAU, and Sky & Telescope
The discovery was made possible because the AT2019qiz tidal disruption event studied by the team was found just a short time after the star ruptured. “Because we recognized it early on, we were actually able to see the curtain of dust and dirt pulling together when the black hole triggered a strong flow of material at speeds of up to 10,000 km / s,” says 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 follow in real time as it devours the black hole.”
Over a 6-month period, the team made observations of AT2019qiz, which was in a spiral galaxy in the constellation Eridanus as the torch increased in luminosity and then faded. “Several sky surveys showed emissions from the new tidal disruption event very quickly after the star was torn apart,” says Wevers. “We immediately pointed a number of ground and space telescopes in that direction to see how the light was created.”
This video sequence enlarges the galaxy in which the tidal disturbance event AT2019qiz takes place. This phenomenon, a ray of light from a star being torn apart by a supermassive black hole, has been studied by ESO telescopes. Photo credit: ESO / Digitalized Sky Survey 2 / N. Risinger (skysurvey.org)
In the following months, several observations of the event were made using facilities such as X-Shooter and EFOSC2, powerful instruments for the ESO’s VLT and ESO’s NTT, located in Chile. The prompt and extensive observations in ultraviolet, optical, X-ray and radio light showed, for the first time, a direct link 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 that it lost roughly half of that to the monster’s black hole, which is over a million times as massive,” says Nicholl, who is also a visiting researcher the University of Edinburgh.
Research helps us 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.
This picture shows the sky around the location of AT2019qiz in the center of the frame. This image was created from images in the Digitalized Sky Survey 2.
Recognition:
ESO / Digitalized Sky Survey 2nd recognition: Davide De Martin
Reference: “A runoff drives the visual rise of the nearby, rapidly evolving tidal disruption event AT2019qiz.” October 12, 2020, Monthly releases from the Royal Astronomical Society.
DOI: 10.1093 / mnras / staa2824
The team consists of M. Nicholl (Birmingham Institute for Gravitational Wave Astronomy and Faculty of Physics and Astronomy, University of Birmingham, UK) [Birmingham] and Institute of Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, Royal Observatory, UK [IfA]), T. Wevers (Institute for Astronomy, University of Cambridge, UK), SR Oates (Birmingham), KD Alexander (Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics and Institute for Physics and Astronomy, Northwestern University, USA) [Northwestern]), G. Leloudas (DTU Space, National Space Institute, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark [DTU]), F. Onori (Istituto di Astrofisica and Planetologia Spaziali (INAF), Roma, Italy), A. Jerkstrand (Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Garching, Germany and Institute for Astronomy, Stockholm University, Sweden) [Stockholm]), S. Gomez (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, Cambridge, USA [CfA]), S. Campana (INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, Italy), I. Arcavi (Faculty of Physics and Astronomy, Tel Aviv University, Israel and CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars Program, CIFAR, Toronto, Canada), P. Charalampopoulos (DTU ), M. Gromadzki (Astronomical Observatory, University of Warsaw, Poland [Warsaw]), N. Ihanec (Warsaw), PG Jonker (Department of Astrophysics / IMAPP, Radboud University, Netherlands) [Radboud] and SRON, Dutch Institute for Space Research, The Netherlands [SRON]), A. Lawrence (IfA), I. Mandel (Monash Center for Astrophysics, Faculty of Physics and Astronomy, Monash University, Australia and ARC Center of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Detection – OzGrav, Australia and Birmingham), S. Schulze (Institute for Particle Physics and Astrophysics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel [Weizmann]) P. Short (IfA), J. Burke (Las Cumbres Observatory, Goleta, USA) [LCO] and Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA [UCSB]), C. McCully (LCO and UCSB) D. Hiramatsu (LCO and UCSB), DA Howell (LCO and UCSB), C. Pellegrino (LCO and UCSB), H. Abbot (Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Australian National University, Australia [ANU]), JP Anderson (European Southern Observatory, Santiago, Chile), E. Berger (CfA), PK Blanchard (northwest), G. Cannizzaro (Radboud and SRON), T.-W. Chen (Stockholm), M. Dennefeld (Institute for Astrophysics Paris (IAP) and Sorbonne University, Paris), L. Galbany (Departamento de Física Teórica y del Cosmos, University of Granada, Spain), S. González-Gaitán (CENTRA) – Centro de Astrofísica e Gravitação and Departamento de Física, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal), G. Hosseinzadeh (CfA), C. Insra (Faculty of Physics and Astronomy, University of Cardiff, Great Britain), I. Irani (Weizmann) ), P. Kuin (Mullard Space Science Laboratory, University of London, Great Britain), T. Müller-Bravo (Faculty of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton, Great Britain), J. Pineda (Departamento de Ciencias Fisicas, University of Andrés Bello, Santiago, Chile), NP Ross (IfA), R. Roy (Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ganeshkhind, India), SJ Smartt (Astrophysics Research Center, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Queen’s University Belfast, UK) [QUB]), KW Smith (QUB), B. Tucker (ANU), Ł. Wyrzykowski (Warsaw), DR Young (QUB).
