Scientists Baffled After a Black Hole 'Burps' a Star's Energy - Three Years Later (npr.org) 41
NPR reports that astronomers have spotted a black hole finally "burping" out energy from a star that it swallowed back in 2018:
How unusual is this? "Super unusual," Yvette Cendes, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian and lead author of the paper, tells NPR. "We've never really seen this before to this degree."
Researchers made the discovery when they used a powerful radio telescope facility — the Very Large Array in New Mexico — to check in on some two dozen black holes where stars had been shredded after coming too close to them. That is, the material in the star was pulled apart, or "spaghettified." Such happenings are called tidal disruption events, or TDEs....
"There's a point when you get too close to a black hole that you can no longer escape the black hole — that's called the event horizon. But this material never crossed that boundary, according to our best estimates," Cendes explains. In other words, the star got close enough to the black hole to get shredded — but not to fall into that point of no return.
But that's not what's unusual about it. Mashable picks up the story, noting it's a black hole, at the center of a galaxy some 665 million light-years from Earth: It's the fact that this star apparently didn't sit well with the black hole for such a long time that surprised them. Researchers have been studying these events with radio telescopes for more than a decade, said Edo Berger, a Harvard astronomy professor and co-author. "There was radio silence for the first three years in this case," Berger said in a statement.
"And now it's dramatically lit up to become one of the most radio luminous ... ever observed."
The discovery suggests that delayed outflows of light from a black hole after swallowing a cosmic object could be happening more often than thought.
Researchers made the discovery when they used a powerful radio telescope facility — the Very Large Array in New Mexico — to check in on some two dozen black holes where stars had been shredded after coming too close to them. That is, the material in the star was pulled apart, or "spaghettified." Such happenings are called tidal disruption events, or TDEs....
"There's a point when you get too close to a black hole that you can no longer escape the black hole — that's called the event horizon. But this material never crossed that boundary, according to our best estimates," Cendes explains. In other words, the star got close enough to the black hole to get shredded — but not to fall into that point of no return.
But that's not what's unusual about it. Mashable picks up the story, noting it's a black hole, at the center of a galaxy some 665 million light-years from Earth: It's the fact that this star apparently didn't sit well with the black hole for such a long time that surprised them. Researchers have been studying these events with radio telescopes for more than a decade, said Edo Berger, a Harvard astronomy professor and co-author. "There was radio silence for the first three years in this case," Berger said in a statement.
"And now it's dramatically lit up to become one of the most radio luminous ... ever observed."
The discovery suggests that delayed outflows of light from a black hole after swallowing a cosmic object could be happening more often than thought.
NPR... (Score:2, Insightful)
You can't find a scientist who isn't surprised that time dilation happens near a black hole?
Somehow I think the journo may have misunderstood the story.
Re:NPR... (Score:5, Informative)
Really NPR? You can't find a scientist who isn't surprised that time dilation happens near a black hole?
I'm a scientist, and that explanation doesn't work. The innermost stable orbit is 3R_s; the time dilation is at that distance is small.
So, if the material is in any kind of orbit, you're far enough from the event horizon that the time dilation is small; and if the material is in close enough that the time dilation is large, it snot in orbit, it's heading in.
Re: NPR... (Score:3)
So perhaps something destabilized the orbit of the star's debris around the black hole. Or the orbit wasn't stable in the long term.
Re: (Score:2)
So perhaps something destabilized the orbit of the star's debris around the black hole.
Yep.
What?
Or the orbit wasn't stable in the long term.
Yep.
How?
Re: NPR... (Score:2)
But I think these fields are not well understood
Re: (Score:2)
Yep.
What?
A nearby planet or star perturbing the star debris' orbit. It's 665 million light years away.We can't see everything going on in its neighborhood.
Re: (Score:3)
Yep.
What?
A nearby planet or star perturbing the star debris' orbit.
A planet or star close enough to be disturbing the accretion disk of material from a star that's been ripped apart by tidal forces ("spaghettified"), it would itself have been ripped apart by tidal forces.
It's 665 million light years away.We can't see everything going on in its neighborhood.
True enough.
Re: NPR... (Score:2)
Who said it was a stable orbit? It could well have been on an orbit that would eventually decay into the black hole, but that would still come nice and high.
Iâ(TM)m sure the scientists writing this paper have considered that though. I am interested in what exactly makes it unusual though. The article doesnâ(TM)t give enough information to understand why.
Re: NPR... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
The black-hole must be run by a bureaucracy, they're just slow.
It would be like the Deep-Space-9 worm-hole aliens being introduced to turkey and potatoes, they wouldn't feel like doing much afterward.
Re:NPR... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet another slashdot denizen with their "I know a couple of things about this subject from casual reading and so I know the answer that experts who study this for years don't".
Re:NPR... (Score:4, Funny)
That’s why I stick around. To hear dumb people try to sound intelligent.
Re: (Score:2)
Thatâ(TM)s why I stick around. To hear dumb people try to sound intelligent.
I stick around for the smart answers. I have to admit, my first thought process was about time dilation. Mr Landis disabused everyone reading of that notion.
All "smart" thought proceeds from the outrageous and impossible to the disciplined and accurate. Bullying the people coming up with the outrageous and impossible limits the originating thoughts and makes us all poorer for it.
Chill bro. You too will be dead one day. Do you want your legacy to be, "made fun of stupid people" or would you rather it be, "en
Re: (Score:1)
Like there's a shortage of that on the internet
Re: (Score:2)
Re: NPR... (Score:2)
Not all space events are natural. It could be aliens playing with things.
headlines....sigh (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
"We've never seen this before! This is so cool!" translates in news speak as "Baffled, Confused, Mystified, Clueless"
Well (Score:2)
We are talking about astronomers here. People who speculate about the first nanoseconds of the universe and it's end when there isn't the physics to even begin to describe what is happening.
They were also so in love with string theory, until they quietly distanced themselves after it was shown it could describe and conceivable universe and more than a few that weren't.
So yeah admitting to a reporter they are baffled isn't high on a list of likely events.
Re: (Score:1)
In this case, "Hiccup!"
"Scientists Baffled" (Score:3)
Really? We're there now?
Refer to an entire profession and ascribe to them a state like "baffled", "stumped", or "terrified", and nobody, anywhere, needs to hear anything in the rest of your communication. It's near the bottom of the click-bait barrel, and it makes the world stupider by simply existing.
Found: a perfectly cromulant word (Score:2)
Spaghettified, and has been used by scientists to describe certain astronomic phenomena, but without the meatballs.
Re: (Score:2)
He described the body being stretched due to the differences in tidal forces, with it being spaghettified.
This may be what I saw [youtube.com], or something similar at a later time.
Re: (Score:2)
More info. from one of the paper's authors... (Score:5, Informative)
"Astronomer here! I am the lead author on this paper, which is definitely the discovery of a lifetime! The TL;DR is we discovered a bunch of material spewing out of a black hole’s surroundings two years after it shredded a star, going as fast as half the speed of light! While we have seen two black holes that “turned on” in radio 100+ days after shredding a star, this is the first time we have the details, and no one expected this!"
So yeah, it's unprecedented that the star was broken up years ago, then started to be 'ejected' from the black hole at 60% the speed of light!
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for this, I originally read that post on Reddit days ago and you just saved me some time trying to reply to all the pedantic comments on this post lol.
Re: (Score:2)
So yeah, it's unprecedented that the star was broken up years ago, then started to be 'ejected' from the black hole at 60% the speed of light!
I could be wrong but I think the more unprecedented part is that matter came back after crossing the event horizon. My understanding is that other "burps" are a huge release of x-rays but not any matter.
If anything, I would say this gives some hope for the mere possibility of one day getting measurements from inside a black hole. We may not have the technology for thousands of years to pull it off but it could be possible which is kind of exciting.
Re: (Score:2)
Dude, it's RIGHT THERE in the summary:
"There's a point when you get too close to a black hole that you can no longer escape the black hole — that's called the event horizon. But this material never crossed that boundary, according to our best estimates," Cendes explains. In other words, the star got close enough to the black hole to get shredded — but not to fall into that point o
Re: (Score:2)
Dude, it's RIGHT THERE in the summary:
Yes... but is it unprecedented? Do we think other "burps" release matter as well? I don't think so but like I said, I could be wrong.
Re: (Score:2)
But this material never crossed that boundary
Oh dang, my bad, I missed it again despite the bold! My deepest apologies, this is ever so embarrassing.
How do they know (Score:3)
Re: Same star or something else? (Score:1)
Somebody did swipe my RV and it hasn't been seen since.
News I can relate to: When's the movie coming out? (Score:2)
And the SF novels that will use this as a premise?
This news has the potential to help launch some really exciting works of fiction/prop up some franchises.
So that planet Kryptonian scientists were using as an observatory base wasn't really lost to a black hole? Kal-El's extremely attractive great-great-great (etc.) grandmother is alive? Ooh, can't wait to meet her. :)
And the hell Black Widow exiled herself to might have a secret portal that could be used as a backdoor way in?
With Tony Stark gone, I'd like t
explosive ejection may be universal (Score:2)
Of course it does. (Score:2)
Seems kinda obvious once you thing about it.
So a star is a big ball of gas, getting denser as you get deeper. The outside edges of a star are first to fall into the black hole. The gas in the star leaves the star as soon as the blackhole's gravity impact on the surface is less than the pressure the gas is at. The peeled off gas will gain speed quickly and enter the accretion disk. As soon as the volume of that spiral, gets less than the volume of the star the fusion will re-ignite. However matter is
Covid theory (Score:1)
> discovery suggests that delayed outflows of light from a black hole after swallowing a cosmic object could be happening more often than thought.
Nah, it's a pandemic fluke: the material sat around watching Netflix until it was safe to go outside.
TDE TLDR? (Score:1)
> the star was pulled apart, or "spaghettified." Such happenings are called tidal disruption events, or TDEs
So that's like "explosion" versus "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly".