The Hubble Telescope recently discovered another cosmic treat. Black holes are known to suck in neighboring space objects. After a supermassive black hole destroyed a neighboring star, turning it into a “donut” the size of our solar system, NASA researchers are now sharing their findings online.
News from #AAS241!
— Hubble (@NASAHubble) January 12, 2023
Hubble recorded a star's final moments as it was ripped apart and eaten up by a black hole – getting twisted into a donut-like shape in the process.
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Massive stars that explode as supernovae often collapse and produce black holes. Even light cannot escape due to its gravitational attraction. Because black holes are undetectable in theory, scientists must rely on the activity of neighboring stars to detect their presence. The largest black holes are called “supermassive” and scientists believe that many galaxies contain these monsters.
A March 2022 study found a black hole orbiting a nearby star in the galaxy ESO 583-G004, about 300 million light-years away. Hubble’s strong ultraviolet sensitivity allowed astronomers to probe light and chemical emissions from a dying star. These include hydrogen and carbon.
These spectacular kills are what scientists call “ocean barrier events.” While that doesn’t sound particularly violent, the NASA team says black holes are “mess eaters,” releasing an equal amount of material to balance out the stellar matter they absorb.
Stars in donuts but how?
According to the study’s authors, a star breaks up like this only a few times every 100,000 years in a galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its heart.
The All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN or “Assassin”) made the first observation of this particular event, known as AT2022dsb, on March 1, 2022. It is a system of ground-based telescopes that scan the night sky. for the random, violent, and brief phenomena that occur throughout the universe.
Although 300 million light-years away, it is still close enough to Earth and bright enough for the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the donut-making event with its ultraviolet spectroscopy, the scientists claim.
“Typically, these events are difficult to observe. You might get some observations at the beginning of the disturbance when it’s really bright. Our program is different in that it only looks at a few tidal events over the course of a year. designed for what happens,” Peter Maxim of the Center for Astrophysics said in a media release.
“We saw it early enough that we could observe it at these very intense stages of black hole growth. We saw a decrease in the accretion rate as it turned into a trickle over time.
Scientists interpret Hubble’s data to indicate that a very bright, hot, donut-shaped region of gas is currently orbiting the black hole, although the event is too far away to see with the naked eye. The group calls this region the Torus and claims that this particular donut is as big as our solar system.
Maxim wrote that scientists were trying to get their heads around the phenomenon.
“You rip the star apart and then it has this material that’s entering the black hole. And so you have models where you think you know what’s going on, And then you’ve got what you actually see. An interesting place for scientists: at the interface of the known and the unknown.
It was the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society where the NASA team presented their findings.
