Ever wondered what happens when a star wanders too close to a supermassive black hole? This is
exactly what occurred a couple of years ago, with a star getting sucked and shredded into
pieces by the overpowering gravity forces. And yet, despite the time that has elapsed,
scientists have recently observed remnants of that activity in space, to witness something
that observers have never seen before! Get your appetite for science tingling,
as we have exciting details about Nasa Captures Black Hole Shredding A Star the size of the sun,
so watch until the end and have your mind blown!
Black Holes In Space
The dark and distant frontier of Space is quite remarkable still a huge mystery to many of us here
on Earth, and while many astronomers, scientists, and researchers have spent countless hours peering
through telescopes to map out the observable space, there are still plenty more things that are
considered unknown to modern science. One of these greatly unknown concepts is what we commonly know
as Black Holes. According to NASA, a black hole is a place in space where gravity pulls so much that
even light can not get out. These astronomical objects have a gravity pull so strong that nothing
can escape it. It has a surface called an “Event Horizon”, which defines the boundary where the
velocity needed to escape it exceeds the speed of light, which is the technical speed limit of the
cosmos, so naturally, veering near one would mean absolute uncertainty. The gravity in these black
holes are so strong due to matter having been squeezed into such a tiny space. These occurrences
and situations have been observed, such as when a star is on the brink of death. But since no light
can ever get out from these black holes, observing them can be quite difficult. In more general
terms, a black hole is relatively invisible, however, space telescopes with special tools
can provide the possibility of finding these black holes, by observing how stars that are very close
to black holes act differently from other stars. Black holes may vary in size, with some being
big or small, or supersized to be massive beyond comprehension. Some scientists believe that the
smallest black holes can be as small as just one atom, but despite their tininess, they can still
have the mass, or the amount of matter of a large mountain. Stellar Black Holes can have a mass of
up to 20 times more mass than our sun, and there can be plenty of stellar mass black holes within
Earth’s galaxy, the Milky Way. Some of the largest black holes, which are called “SuperMassive”, can
hold a mass that are more than 1 million of our suns combined. Astronomers and scientist believe
that all normal sized and large sized galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their center,
with the supermassive black hole within our own Milky Way Galaxy called Sagittarius A, with a mass
equal to 4 million suns. And as scientists have continued gaining more understanding as to these
colossal astronomical objects, keen observations continue to uncover plenty more information. By
observing the stars and gas within the proximity of a black hole, astronomers are able to see how
a black hole can affect its trajectories, due to its massive gravity. In fact, when a
black hole and a star are within close proximity, high-energy light is observed, which can, in fact,
be seen with human eyes. Using satellites and telescopes aimed towards deep space,
researchers are able to witness this high-energy light, to record unbelievable findings.
Tidal Disruption Event Such an event occurred more recently,
when a small star was witnessed to have been ripped to shreds as it wandered too close to a
black hole in a galaxy located 375 million light years from Earth. At the end of September 2019,
NASA was able to capture an extremely rare phenomenon known as a Tidal Disruption event,
using the space agency’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS. A Tidal Disruption
event occurs when a star moves too close to a black hole, as extreme gravity from the black
hole causes the star to bulge and break apart into a stream of gas. This particular incident
showed a star similar to our sun being sucked into the gravitiational pull of the black hole,
with this one being a supermassive black hole that weighs around 6 million times our Sun’s mass. This
event allowed scientists to observe the stream of gas, with its tail escaping into space, eventually
swinging around to form an accretion disk. The event was dubbed ASASSN-19BT, which is in part
of the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae, was viewed by TESS’s four cameras, which scan
sectors of the sky, and monitored this region of space for a full year. According to astronomers,
this blast only happens once every 10,000 to 100,000 years in a galaxy the size of Milky Way,
so it’s extremely rare for scientists to be able to observe the occurrence from beginning to end.
When this sector of space started to brighter, TESS focused its cameras on ASASSN-19BT,
and quickly observed the outburst in visible light, UV, and X-Rays. It was also able to mark
a sudden decrease in temperature never before seen in a tidal disruption. Using the UV Data,
it was determined that the temperature dropped by about 50% from around 71,500 to 35,500 degrees
Fahrenheit (or 40,000 to 20,000 degrees Celsius) during the event. With NASA’s TESS having been
able to identify this tidal disruption early on within it’s event occurrence,
multiwavelength observations were triggered even within the first few days, allowing early data to
provide more helpful information towards modeling the physics of these outbursts.
NEW DATA While Stars being
ripped to shreds by black holes may seem like a natural occurrence, it’s input of information
continue to be highly valuable, especially since most of our understanding of these Black holes
are specifically theoratical and data-driven. And while these events may seem thrilling,
these occurences do not come as a surprise to many astronomers who get to witness these
violent incidents on numerous occasions as they continually observe the night sky. However, this
particular event, the ASASSN-19BT, continue to provide astronomers a reason to keep peering into
its direction. Nearly three years after the star was ripped to shreds, the same black hole is once
again lighting up charts and deep space, despite not having swallowed anything new as of late.
Researchers from the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard and Smithsonian continue to analyze this
phenomenon, as they all admit that this occurrence has caught everyone by surprise, and that in fact,
no one has ever seen anything like this before. The team were able to spot unusual outbursts while
revisiting the tidal disruption event, and using radio data from the Very Large Array or VLA in New
Mexico, it was observed that the same black hole had mysteriously reanimated back in June 2021,
leading to the research team rushing in to examine the event more closely. By collating
data from different observations sites, such as the ALMA observatory in Chile,
the MeerKAT in South Africa, the Australian Telescope Compact Array in Australia,
and the Chandra X-ray observatory, as well as the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory in space,
allowed the researchers to piece together what was behind these unusual outbursts. The team were able
to conclude that the black hole in question had been ejecting material, presumably from
the star it had just more recently swallowed up, and had been spewing excess material at half the
speed of light. Scientists are unsure as to why this outflow had been delayed by several years,
which is why further understanding is required to identify this significant part of the black holes’
feeding behavior. In essence, scientists are saying that this occurrence is plainly the black
hole seemingly “burping” after a heavy meal. It is only during these Tidal Disruption Events that
scientists get to peer into a black hole’s unknown behaviors, due to the light that is emitted when
these TDEs occur. Gravitational forces begin to stretch or spaghettify a star that comes to close
to a black hole, with the star eventually turning into an elongated material that spirals around the
black hole and heats up. This creates a flash of light that astronomers can spot from millions of
light years away. Some of these materials from the star itself gets flung out back into space,
as not everything gets totally consumed by the black hole. This emission, which is known
as the outflow, often develops right after a Tidal Disruption Event, and not years later,
which is the case we’re seeing here. It’s also important to note that most outflows have been
marked as being spewed out of a black hole with speeds of up to 10 percent of the speed of light,
while this event reflected outflow material which were traveling as fast as 50 percent
the speed of light. This is the first time scientists have ever recorded and observed
quite a delay between the feeding and the outflow, which is why astronomers are
ever keener at exploring what actually happens when black holes eat up stars.
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