Massive Black Hole Devours Star 77
H3xx writes "Astronomers have observed a black hole shredding a star and sending a powerful beam of energy toward Earth. When it was first observed on March 28th by the Swift spacecraft, it was thought to be the implosion of an aging star, but is now believed to be the result of a star wandering too close to a black hole, imploding and converting 10% of the star's mass into gamma radiation. The energy burst is still visible by telescope more than two-and-a-half months later, the researchers report in the journal Science."
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Black Hole: Me eat star! *omnomnom*
Star: *gurk*
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Star: Red no Yellow no Blue no Black? aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
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Omnomnom and omnomnomnom are onomatopoeic words for the sound of one gobbling up something.
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Will we also get a Packt Publishing book on some drupal extension called "Black Hole" as well? That would be the trifecta!
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I dunno, I'd imagine it'd be a bit spicy....
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week! Try the Betelgeuse, it's to die for!
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Neither. It's a relative term -- the black hole in question is the black hole at the centre of a galaxy. I've not read the Science article (I've only read the abstract) so they've not put numbers on it, but it'll be thousands and thousands times the mass of the Sun. A black hole which isn't massive would be up to maybe ten times the mass of the Sun.
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Imploding? (Score:3)
From TFA:
But this event, first spotted on 28 March 2011 and designated Sw 1644+57, does not have the marks of an imploding sun.
More like it got ripped apart. Shredded. As TFA's headline said.
The summary confused me, since pulling mass away from a star would remove the mass that contributes to implosion (which occurs when the continuous explosion within it slows to where it can't keep the star inflated enough and the density gets low enough for implosion to begin, leaving a neutron star or a black hole). But TFA straightened it out.
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Is that to say that the black hole by shredding apart the star, created another black hole, probably residing in side the first one, seeing as it ate up the star??
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No, it's saying that it could not, because it's stripping matter away, preventing formation of a black hole or neutron star.
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Harmful? (Score:2)
How far away is this spectacle? Aren't gamma rays harmful?
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Nearly 4 billion light years.
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So, then, does this set a record on /. for the oldest "old news" story?
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No, the news about the Plank Telescope [wikipedia.org] have that record already.
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I would think that articles concerning the Big Bang would predate the 4 billion years of this story, so probably not. If you consider our past discussions about multiple universes, oscillating universes, and so forth, it becomes even more muddy. I personally would like it just fine if Slashdot managed to make it no more than a week behind the headlines on other sites, versus the months to years that we get sometimes around here. Still, there is no other site on the Internet besides Arstechnica that has the
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No, they take chunks of your body with them. That's not "right through".
Re:Harmful? (Score:4, Interesting)
Redshift of 0.3 or so. Corresponds to a luminosity distance of almost 2 gigaparsecs. That's pretty far away.
Also, those gamma rays are all observed above the atmosphere. Interesting and totally off-topic aside, gamma ray bursters were only observed when we started putting military satellites in orbit to check on nuclear development. There were all these high-intensity sources around, leading to an investigation as to whether the Soviets had any new technology. Eventually it was determined that, no, they didn't and that these sources were extremely far away.
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Either that, or the Soviets managed to develop intergalactic weapon systems. ;)
Yeah, we probably would have noticed... probably...
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Hey, they could've done. A lot of things were hidden behind the Iron Curtain and were lost in the chaos of the 90s...
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No, I'm pretty sure they give you superpowers.
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Old News (Score:2)
This happened almost four billion years ago. :-/
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well, true, but i can certainly establish a meaningful measure. that thing's in our past light-cone, so it's not like it's separated by spacelike geodesics or anything. what they did in the article itself was to use the luminosity distance to say how far away it is. it's not a big jump from there to a time.
it's the same as saying the universe is 13.7 billion years old. it is, if you choose the right coordinate system and are careful enough about how you define it.
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i interpreted him as meaning that i can swap to any coordinate system i like with any time coordinate i choose. of course, we're still connected to it on a null geodesic and can define meaningful measures of distance and time
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This week in unnecessary censorship! (Score:1)
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Pics or it didn't happen!
Question (Score:2)
FTFA:
the star becomes elongated, first spreading out to form a "banana shape" before its inner edge - orbiting faster than the outer edge - pulls the star into a disc-shape that wraps itself around the hole.
At this point, can fusion even occur at the core of the star? If not, can it even be considered a star once it's matter has been wrapped around a black hole? At what point do we stop referring to it as a star and just consider it part of the black hole's accretion disk. I suppose it really doesn't make a difference what it's called though, since it won't be around for very long.
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FTFA:
the star becomes elongated, first spreading out to form a "banana shape" before its inner edge - orbiting faster than the outer edge - pulls the star into a disc-shape that wraps itself around the hole.
At this point, can fusion even occur at the core of the star? If not, can it even be considered a star once it's matter has been wrapped around a black hole? At what point do we stop referring to it as a star and just consider it part of the black hole's accretion disk. I suppose it really doesn't make a difference what it's called though, since it won't be around for very long.
When you eat chicken, when does it stop being chicken and begin being you? Mind-blowing, huh?
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If the fusion has stopped because the tidal force from the black hole is relieving the gravitational pressure between the star's atoms, it's no longer a star. It's now the gas-giant formerly known as the star, soon to be the accretion disk.
But you can still safely say "the black hole shredded the star", because nothing else could.
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"No ads? Kwel!"
click...
"WTF!! My eyes!!!! rip.... them.... OFF!!"
How much of a star falls into a black hole? (Score:1)
I'm still looking for diligent answer to my StackExchange question: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8294/how-much-of-a-star-falls-into-a-black-hole [stackexchange.com]
Arbitrary masses for the star and black hole should be fine, as you should be able to obtain a percentage of the star that is "DEVOURED!!11" and then create a line chart of the behaviors of stars and black holes with varying masses.
This seems important just to know, but also to make predictions for the Black Hole model.
Then again, I'm too dumb to answe
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According to TFA, all but 10%. Probably some small amount gets blown away by various processes that accelerate particles to near-light speed, but we're talking about a gravitational field capable of sucking down a star like a pan-dimensional soda straw. Anything with remaining rest mass is getting drained, eventually.
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What a wonderful coincidence to look foolish. But note the quote "10% of its mass is turned into energy and radiated as X-rays" so 10% is X-rays, but doesn't speak to the rest of the spectrum.
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The rest of the spectrum is, if not negligible, then somewhat less significant than the X-rays.
The distribution is not flat. It will have a big hump peaking in the x-rays and long tails above and below.
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Assuming... But measured against what timescale? Data. Data. Data.
You don't need SWIFT to answer that.... (Score:3)
You apparently have a right-spin dryer.
These are known to reverse the polarity of left socks, converting them to right socks.
To correct this, you must manually spin the dryer the opposite direction exactly half the number of rotations.
This will reverse the polarity of half the socks back to left socks.
"beams" of energy (Score:1)
"sending a powerful beam of energy toward Earth."
Perhaps I'm being pedantic about word choice here - surely a first for /. - but a "beam" of energy implies to me that the energy is narrow and focused, and that description made me think that something came out aimed at Earth (though not, of course, by any deliberate agency.) The original article uses the word "burst" which seems far more appropriate for the kind of energy release its talking about.
Re:"beams" of energy (Score:5, Informative)
generally black holes eject along beams from their poles. if one of those beams is pointing towards earth we get a big flash; if it's not we don't see as much.
it's much the same with pulsars. the standard model is that they're neutron stars emitting extremely focused radiation from their poles.
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Truth. And I was interested in whether this was the case here (and we were therefore extremely lucky to be able to observe the event) so I went back to the linked article. It too isn't terribly clear, but it uses the term "burst" fairly consistently, which would imply a non-directional release of energy, at least to me. Of course, that's also trusting someone to have gotten the semantics right, and I don't have much faith in modern science press, but I was too lazy to follow a second set of links to the
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The full paper's here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.3356 [arxiv.org]
I skimmed it earlier but I don't know if you'll get a better answer from the paper -- they're cautious and they're presenting their results and suggesting a few models (and pointing out that it's strongly identified with the centre of the host galaxy and most likely a star falling into the central black hole) but they're not doing any firm models.
I believe (though it's not my field so I might be very out-dated; I learned about these at university and that
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Re:Naaaa. not gonn happen like this (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sure the people spending years programming supercomputers to model supernovae will be fascinated to hear your ruminations. Not sure they'd agree with them, though...
Just a few thoughts in reply:
Not every star goes supernova. In fact, supernovae are really very rare. Most stars have a less violent end. Our own sun, for example, is never going to go supernova but is likely to become a planetary nebula and look quite beautiful to a civilisation a few tens of light years away.
Even if this star would be massive enough to go supernova, why would you assume that tidal stresses would cause a supernova? Or that you can trigger a supernova like that? Supernovae happen when the core of the star is basically made out of iron and it stops burning; the envelope then collapses under gravity and bounces, dramatically and catastrophically. A star that isn't at that stage isn't going to go supernova regardless of what stresses you put it through.
A supernova spits out a lot of gamma radiation, that's true. It also spits out a hell of a lot of other radiation -- and it's pretty characteristic, too. We know what the spectra of different types of supernovae look like and we know how the light-curves evolve over time. If this was a star going supernova we could tell, even if it were falling into a black hole at the same time.
And theoretically, it's possible for a star to become elongated and stretched. Consider a much less brutal example -- a red giant being orbited by a smaller orange star. There's something called a "Roche lobe" which is basically defines where the star's gravity dominates. That means that something within the Roche lobe of one star it's bound to that one, while if it's within the Roche lobe of the other it's bound to *that* one. But if the stars get close enough, there's a point where the Roche lobes meet -- and the two lobes elongate to touch one-another. The giant can then expand, as giants are wont to, and fill its Roche lobe. It takes on an elongated form (and a small stream of matter spirals into the other star). A slightly more dramatic version of this is when a star is orbiting a neutron star; given enough material flowing from the elongated companion onto the neutron star and you *do* trigger a supernova... but it's of the neutron star and not the companion.
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That wasn't meant to be as arsey as it sounds, by the way.
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That wasn't meant to be as arsey as it sounds, by the way.
Not arsey at all, IMHO.
Thanks for a succinct and highly informative post. :-)
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The tidal force relieves the gravitational pressure on part of the star, putting out fusion right there.
Is the loss of fusion pressure going to allow that region to collapse on itself enough to super-nova? Or is the tidal force now great enough to keep it from collapsing to that density? Or was the fusion pressure itself causing fusion in a region that couldn't attain the density without the shockwave?
I think most of the star continues to fuse until it's so close it couldn't fuse if it tried. Anything that
Re:Naaaa. not gonn happen like this (Score:4, Interesting)
I personally dont believe that its possible for a star to be "elongated" and stretched..
If a star [hubblesite.org] can contort itself into odd shapes, what makes you think a black hole can't stretch one out of shape?
big news of galactic proportions (Score:1)
Massive Black Hole Devours Star (Score:2)
So they've finally found a Black Hole Sun?
Oh no... (Score:1)
i'm so excited (Score:2)
ULTIMATE vor (the universe episodes)