Astronomers have made a groundbreaking discovery, linking two mysterious cosmic phenomena – the destruction of a star by a black hole and the semi-regular bursts of X-rays from galactic centers. This discovery, made using a suite of powerful telescopes, sheds new light on the complex interactions between black holes and the celestial objects they encounter. As a massive black hole tears apart one star, it uses the resulting debris to attack another, providing a rare glimpse into the violent processes that shape our universe.
The Devouring of a Star
This was what we know happened in 2019 when astronomers saw some spectacle of nature -a star appropriating to the orbit around a supermassive black hole got caught by immense gravitational forces and shredded. This phenomenon is called a ‘tidal disruption event,’ and while it is relatively rare, it offers an extraordinary opportunity to investigate the aftermath of these type of cosmic catastrophes.
When the star was torn apart by the black hole, its leftovers created a disk of gas and dust around it, a sort of astral graveyard. Over the next several years, this disk has ballooned and now sits directly in the way of another star or perhaps a smaller black hole that had previously been orbiting at a respectful distance around the giant black hole.
The Bursting Disk
This orbiting object, whether a star or a smaller black hole, crashes through the debris disk over and over again, generating a series of violent ‘splashes’ of X-ray radiation detected with the Chandra X-ray Observatory. It has periodic flares or X-ray events (upper panel), which is a bright, sudden increase in the object’s brightness around the black hole was on an approximately 48-hour period (lower panel shows only first few days).
“Picture a diver who keeps diving into a pool, making a splash time after time,” describes study lead author Matt Nicholl of Queen’s University Belfast. In this analogy, the star is the diver and the disk is the pool, and every time the star plummets near the surface, it creates a giant “splash” of gas as well as X-rays. The image above shows the location of ASASSN–14ko in relation to another cosmic phenomena—tidal disruption events and so-called “quasi-periodic eruptions,” bright X-ray flashes from the center of galaxies—that have never been linked before.
Decoding the Behavior of Black Holes
According to scientists, this finding has far-reaching consequences for what we know already know about… — April 9 the human experience These recurring X-ray flares offer astronomers a rare opportunity to understand the characteristics and properties of orbiting debris as well as the motions of three objects in relation to each other.
Data from the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories enable researchers to build a 3-D model of the distribution of dust in the complex exoplanetary system, which has grown large enough to overlap with the orbit of the object repeatedly disrupting this debris disk. The result indirectly shows that the disk takes years to grow outwards enough to influence other objects and gives a key timeline of the time taken for the development of these quasi-periodic eruptions.
As astroomers continue to tease out the secrets of this extraordinary system, they will be on the lookout for more such puzzles, which could potentially make great targets for future gravitational wave observatories. Putting together the complex relationships between black holes, stars and all the stuff they leave behind helps us learn about the events that are involved in building our universe.
