• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Black Holes Caught Snacking On The Same Stars Regularly

January 13, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

We all have those snacks we can’t resist. And it seems that two particular supermassive black holes are the same way. Repeated flares have been spotted coming from the centers of two galaxies, where their supermassive black holes reside. These sudden brightenings were a type of tidal disruption event (TDE). A star got too close to the black hole, was ripped apart, and the stellar material was heated as it spiraled toward the black hole.

Usually, these TDEs are a one-off transient event, because the star in question is completely ripped apart, but in the case of eRASSt J045650.3–203750 and AT2018fyk, which are located almost 900 million light-years and 1 billion light-years away, the two have not killed the stars just yet. As the object comes closer to the black holes, they take some of its material, causing a repeated TDE.

Advertisement

The first example was spotted by the X-ray telescope eROSITA and then followed up by the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton. The star in question appears to get too close to the black hole every 233 days.

“The results from our first XMM-Newton observation were surprising. The black hole showed an unusually drastic dimming of X-ray light, compared to when it had been discovered two weeks previously by the eROSITA telescope. Follow-up observations with XMM-Newton and other instruments confirmed our speculations that this behaviour was being caused by a partial tidal disruption event,” one of the two teams’ leaders, Zhu Liu from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, said in a statement.



The second event, spotted by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae shone brightly for at least 500 days and then dimmed before shining back up 1,200 days after the original event. The behavior was not easily explained, but the team had different models to test the data against.

Advertisement

“At first, we were absolutely puzzled by what the rebrightening could mean. We had to go back to the drawing board to assess all the possible options to explain the observed behaviour. It was a very exciting moment when we realised that the model for a repeating tidal disruption event could reproduce the observed data,” explained the other team leader, Thomas Wevers, from the European Southern Observatory.

Usually, stars that get tidally disrupted are just passers-by that got unlucky enough to be too near. The new studies suggest that the stars had been pulled in a close orbit around the black hole. And the teams are planning to keep an eye on these two systems around the predicted return time. Hopefully, the stars are still there and were not completely devoured during the last passage.

The paper describing the work done by Liu’s team was published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. Wevers et al’s paper has been accepted by The Astrophysical Journal Letters and is available on the ArXiv.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Social network Peanut expands to include more women with launch of Peanut Menopause
  2. Marketmind: Watch those spiralling gas prices
  3. ECB to zoom in on inflation expectations, wages: Lagarde
  4. Why Are Some Rockets Orange?

Source Link: Black Holes Caught Snacking On The Same Stars Regularly

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Crocodiles Weren’t All Blood-Thirsty Killers, Some Evolved To Be Plant-Eating Vegetarians
  • Stratospheric Warming Event May Be Unfolding In The Southern Polar Vortex, Shaking Up Global Weather Systems
  • 15 Years Ago, Bees In Brooklyn Appeared Red After Snacking Where They Shouldn’t
  • Carnian Pluvial Event: It Rained For 2 Million Years — And It Changed Planet Earth Forever
  • There’s Volcanic Unrest At The Campi Flegrei Caldera – Here’s What We Know
  • The “Rumpelstiltskin Effect”: When Just Getting A Diagnosis Is Enough To Start The Healing
  • In 1962, A Boy Found A Radioactive Capsule And Brought It Inside His House — With Tragic Results
  • This Cute Creature Has One Of The Largest Genomes Of Any Mammal, With 114 Chromosomes
  • Little Air And Dramatic Evolutionary Changes Await Future Humans On Mars
  • “Black Hole Stars” Might Solve Unexplained JWST Discovery
  • Pretty In Purple: Why Do Some Otters Have Purple Teeth And Bones? It’s All Down To Their Spiky Diets
  • The World’s Largest Carnivoran Is A 3,600-Kilogram Giant That Weighs More Than Your Car
  • Devastating “Rogue Waves” Finally Have An Explanation
  • Meet The “Masked Seducer”, A Unique Bat With A Never-Before-Seen Courtship Display
  • Alaska’s Salmon River Is Turning Orange – And It’s A Stark Warning
  • Meet The Heaviest Jelly In The Seas, Weighing Over Twice As Much As A Grand Piano
  • For The First Time, We’ve Found Evidence Climate Change Is Attracting Invasive Species To Canadian Arctic
  • What Are Microfiber Cloths, And How Do They Clean So Well?
  • Stowaway Rat That Hopped On A Flight From Miami Was A “Wake-Up Call” For Global Health
  • Andromeda, Solar Storms, And A 1 Billion Pixel Image Crowned Best Astrophotos Of The Year
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version