A star wanders too close to a black hole. It gets sucked in and never to be seen again. A lot of its material gets superheated on the way in and that results in a lot of X-rays. That is not a correct explanation.
A team of astronomer at the University of California at Berkeley have more to tell. They used a special instrument to study the event. There is a black hole there. It was surprising.
Black holes are found in the universe. There are strange things that happen when a star wanders by. The star's material is stretched in a process called "spaghettification".
Studies show that other things happen. Some of the doomed star's material is sent out to space. It is part of its strangeness.
One of the craziest things a black hole can do is to destroy a star.
Calculating the properties of black holes at the centers of galaxies is one of the few ways that astronomy knows about them. Astronomers don't understand the complicated processes after a tidal disruption due to the high cost of simulations.
It's important to study an actual star as it dies. One that got too close to a black hole was the focus of the Berkeley group.
The disaster took place 215 million light-years away from Earth. The star shredded as it spiraled into the disk.
Something wonderful happened after that. It took a lot of work to see it.
The disruption event looked bright in the optical light, so the team members decided to look at it in a different way. Light waves traveling in a single plane reduce the intensity of the light. The principle of reducing glare is the same as the one used for sunglasses.
The team was able to see the aftermath of the shredding of the star. They don't get to look at that. They did not see the expected amount of X-rays. What was happening?
The black hole's hungry maw didn't get much of the star's material. Some people got smeared. The cloud of leftover stellar material was created by the strong winds from the black hole. It went out at about 10,000 kilometers per second. The cloud gave some surprises.
Alex Filippenko is a professor of astronomy and a member of the research team.
This unique look at the disruption of a star explains why large amounts of high-energy X-rays have not been seen. Much of the high-energy radiation is being blocked by the cloud because of the strong winds.
The lead author of the study said that people had seen wind coming out of the events.
The evidence is stronger because you wouldn't get a spherical geometry if you didn't have enough wind. A lot of the material in the star is blown away from the black hole.
The study of what happens when other stars encounter black holes can be done using a light source. Astronomers have access to events in the accretion disk. It isn't an easy job.
Filippenko said that you can't really study the structure of the explosions because they are so far away. We can deduce some information about the distribution of the matter in that explosion or the shape of the accretion disk by studying the light.
These bright "eruptions" are bright enough to provide a useful tool to map these events. Even if it's in a distant universe, such observations could help build a "tomographic" picture of a tidal disruption event.
This article was published in the past. The original article is worth a read.
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