Black Hole Shreds Star And Has Moved On To Another Target

Space.com

Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes, astronomers have found that a black hole that shredded a star has moved onto a another star or stellar black hole.   Credit: NASA/CXC/A. Hobart

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00:00Visit Chandra's Beautiful Universe. AT2019QIZ

00:09A massive black hole has torn apart one star and is now using that stellar wreckage to

00:16pummel another star, or smaller black hole, that used to be in the clear.

00:21This discovery, made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes, helps

00:26astronomers link two mysteries where there had previously only been hints of a connection.

00:31In 2019, astronomers witnessed the signal of a star that got too close to a black hole

00:37and was destroyed by the black hole's gravitational forces.

00:41Once shredded, the star's remains began circling the black hole in a disk in a type

00:46of stellar graveyard. Over a few years, however, this disk has expanded

00:52outward and is now directly in the path of a star, or possibly a stellar mass black hole,

00:58orbiting the massive black hole at a previously safe distance.

01:02The orbiting star is now repeatedly crashing through the debris disk, about once every

01:0648 hours, as it circles. When it does, the collision costs bursts of X-rays that astronomers

01:13captured with Chandra. Like a diver repeatedly going into a pool

01:18and creating a splash every time she enters the water, the star striking the disk creates

01:23a huge splash of gas and X-rays. As the star orbits around the black hole, it does this

01:29over and over again. Scientists have documented many cases where an object gets too close

01:35to a black hole and gets torn apart in a single burst of light.

01:39Astronomers call these tidal disruption events, or TDEs. In recent years, astronomers have

01:45also discovered a new class of bright flashes from the centers of galaxies, which are detected

01:50only in X-rays and repeat many times. These events are also connected to supermassive

01:55black holes, but astronomers could not explain what caused the semi-regular bursts of X-rays.

02:02They dubbed these quasi-periodic eruptions, or QPEs. This discovery gives astronomers

02:08evidence that TDEs and QPEs can be different phases of the same phenomenon.

02:13In addition to Chandra, the researchers used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, NICER Telescope

02:19aboard the International Space Station, and the Neil Gerl Swift Telescope. Astronomers

02:24will continue to look for more of these events to learn more about how black holes grow and

02:29to study the prevalence and distances of objects in close orbits around massive black holes.

02:43NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology

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