Black holes' eating habits have been revealed by a crime scene.
A new study shows how black holes consume material from objects that are too close to them. A lot of material is blown away from the black hole rather than being consumed by it.
The aftermath of a sunlike star being destroyed by a black hole over 1 million times its mass was seen in October 2019. The closest example of a stellar body being "spaghettified" by a black hole was this one.
The black hole killed the star.
In the constellation Eridanus, there was a tidal disruption event. Astronomers were able to study the details of what happens to the star's material after it is shredded due to the bright event.
The stellar material was blasted away from the black hole at speeds as high as 22 million mph.
The cloud of gas created by this blast is symmetrical. The distance from Earth to the sun is 200 times larger than this gas cloud. Its outer edge is close to the central black hole and it is 100 times larger than our planet.
One of the craziest things a black hole can do is to destroy a star. Calculating the properties of black holes at the center 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.
Astronomers don't see X-rays from other TDEs because of the new findings. The material from the star is dragged into the black hole. When the material falls into the black hole, it creates high-energy emissions. Powerful winds blow out gas clouds that obscure emissions.
"This observation rules out a class of solutions that have been proposed theoretically and gives us a stronger constraint on what happens to gas around a black hole," said the lead author of the paper. "People have been seeing other evidence of wind coming out of these events, and I think this study definitely makes that evidence stronger, in the sense that you wouldn't get a spherical geometry without having a sufficient amount of wind"
A significant portion of the material in the star that is spiraling inward doesn't fall into the black hole.
There is a theory that when a star is destroyed by a black hole, a disk forms. This TDE doesn't show a high degree of polarized light.
The second set of observations from this event in November showed that the light was not very bright. The team said that the gas cloud of ejected material appeared to be asymmetrical around the black hole.
The accretion disk is hot enough to emit most of its light in X-rays, but that light has to come through this cloud, and there are many scatterings, absorptions, and reemissions of light before it can escape out of this cloud The light goes all the way down to ultraviolet and optical energies with each process. The state of the photon is determined by the last scatter. The geometry of the surface can be deduced by measuring polarization.
The "deathbed scenario" the team observed for this star may not apply to TDEs in which jets of material are ejected from the poles of the black hole. Further studies of TDEs will be required to answer this question.
Petra said that few people are well-versed enough in the technique around the world to use a polarization study. This is a new area for tidal disruption events.
The Lick Observatory is located in San Jose, California and has a 10-foot telescope. The telescope is fitted with an instrument that can determine the wavelength of light.
In September's issue of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the paper will be published.
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