Astronomers were stunned to find a black hole 'burping' out energy from a small star it ate up 2 years ago. The discovery opens a new dimension in our understanding of physics,' one scientist said.
DESY, Science Communication Lab
Astronomers have published a major finding: A black hole has been"burping" out energy from a small star it was observed shredding in 2018, after two years in which it didn't eject any such material."Super unusual," Yvette Cendes, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian and lead authorResearchers made the discovery when they
used a powerful radio telescope facility — the Very Large Array in New Mexico – to check in on some two dozen black holes where stars had been shredded after coming too close to them. That is, the material in the star was pulled apart, or"spaghettified." Such happenings are called tidal disruption events, or TDEs.What they found was that one of the TDEs was emitting energy at an unusual velocity and at a very surprising time: more than two years after the event.
This behavior is different from what has been observed in black holes before, in two ways. First, the timing: it's more common to see radio emissions from black holes within the first few months after swallowing a star. And second, the energy being emitted in this case doesn't quite fit with what astronomers have seen before.
In most cases of black holes swallowing stars, perhaps 99%, the outflow is lower in energy. And in 1% of cases, that outflow is way more –"an extremely jetted event," says Cendes, a very rare occurrence.This marks"the first case where we've seen this sort of speed associated with this event or this type of outflow," Cendes explains.
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