A star is shredded by a black hole and the artist's conception of a Tidal Disruption event. A jet of particles is ejected from a disk around a black hole when material from the star spirals into it.
There are decades of radio astronomy data in the archives of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Astronomers have found a signature jet from a black hole that devoured a star several decades ago. The first candidate event in the radio regime was discovered in 2020, according to a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal. The discovery was presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
It's a popular misconception that black holes act like vacuum cleaners, sucking up everything in their vicinity. Light and black holes are both messy eaters and only stuff that passes beyond the event horizon can escape. That means that part of an object's matter is ejected in a powerful jet.
If that object is a star, the process of being shredded by the black hole's force is outside the event horizon, and part of the star's mass is ejected. The accretion disk can be formed around the black hole that emits powerful X-rays and visible light, and sometimes radio waves. Astronomers can infer the presence of a black hole by using those jets. They're known asidal disruption events.
The first direct image of the aftermath of a star being shredded by a black hole 20 million times more massive than our Sun was announced by the astronomer. The two colliding galaxies are 150 million light years away from Earth. The formation and expansion of the jet of matter was followed by the use of a combination of telescopes. The matter was ejected after a star was shredded by a black hole.
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The first direct evidence that outflowing gas during disruption and accretion produces powerful optical and radio emissions was found in 2020 by Astronomers.
Astronomers can't see these powerful bursts of light because they are shrouded behind a curtain of dust and debris. The power of radio surveys to discover TDEs was demonstrated by the study. The events can be used to study the inner workings of black holes.
The new TDE candidate is called J1533+2727. When he was at Harvard University, two of his high school interns spotted it. The image of a bright radio object that was taken in the mid 1990s had faded by the time they pored over the archives. They found images of the same object in the archives of the Green Bank 300-foot telescope, which showed the object had been even brighter.
The object was found to have been caused by a black hole at the center of a galaxy 500 million light years away that devoured a star and sent a radio jet into the air.
It's the closest example of this type of TDE candidate yet found, suggesting that such radio-bright events might be more common than previously thought.
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