Black holes are the most extreme objects in the universe. These objects form when stars blow off their outer layers and are so powerful that nothing can escape their surfaces. The laws of physics can be observed under the most extreme conditions. The stars and other objects in their vicinity will get a lot of light and radiation from these giant monsters.
Astronomers were able to observe a black hole in a galaxy located 668 million light-years away from Earth. Three years after examining the same black hole, another team from the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics noticed something new. The black hole was shining bright because it was expelling material from the star at half the speed of light. Black holes feed and grow over time.
The team was led by a research associate with the CfA, who was joined by an international team of researchers from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. A paper about their findings was published in the Astrophysical Journal.
The team observed the outburst while looking at the data from the last few years. Spaghettification occurs when stars are pulled apart when they pass too close to black holes. Astronomers at Ohio State University were part of the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae.
The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae, and the UV-Optical Telescope were used by the international team. Sebastian Gomez is a graduate student at the Space Telescope Science Institute and co-author of the new paper. He said that the TDE was unremarkable. Cendes and her colleagues looked at it again in June of 2021.
They were surprised to see that the black hole had come back to life. The press release explained that.
No one has ever seen something like this before. Director's Discretionary Time is when you find something so unexpected that you can't wait for the normal cycle of telescope proposals to see it. The applications were accepted quickly.
The team used multiple telescopes and different wavelength telescopes to conduct follow up observations. Radio observations were made with the VLA, the ALMA Observatory, and the Australian Telescope Compact array. The Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory obtained the data.
Edo Berger is a professor of astronomy at Harvard University and a co-author on the new study.
We have been studying TDEs with radio telescopes for more than a decade, and we sometimes find they shine in radio waves while the star is first being devoured by the black hole. There was no radio for the first three years, but now it is one of the most radio-luminous TDEs ever observed.
Residual material from the star was ejected from the black hole at a fraction of the speed of light. This is the first time that astronomy has ever observed such a phenomenon, and the team is not sure why the outflow was delayed. Astronomers can see millions of light-years away from a black hole caused by a flash of spaghettified material around it.
Some spaghettified material will be thrown back into space. The outflow emissions usually develop after a TDE. It is as if this black hole began burping out a bunch of stellar material a long time ago. The ejected material reached speeds of up to 50% the speed of light, which is five times the speed of light seen with other TDEs. Berger said, "Yes."
This is the first time that we've seen a long delay between the feeding and the outflow. We have not been looking at TDEs late enough in their evolution, so the next step is to find out if this actually happens more frequently.
Explanation of the feeding behavior of black holes will be aided by these results. It could give insight into how they grow and evolve with time and their role in the evolution of the universe.
Further reading includes Harvard and the Museum of Anthropology. A journal about astronomy.
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