Most stars die with a bang, exploding in a massive supernova. However, some stars observe a different death and are consumed by the black hole. The astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have recorded a star's final moments in detail as it gets gobbled up by a black hole. They witnessed a black hole transforming a star into what appeared to be a massive doughnut before swallowing it completely.
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| Tidal disruption events constitute the entire process, according to NASA. |
According to the American space agency NASA, once a star is close enough, it is severely torn apart by the black hole's gravitational pull and its gases are sloppily devoured while a powerful radiation field is exhaled.
Tidal disruption events constitute the entire process, according to NASA. They are among the most complicated and violent events that have ever been observed in the universe. "But the wording belies the complex, raw violence of a black hole encounter. There is a balance between the black hole's gravity pulling in star stuff, and radiation blowing material out. In other words, black holes are messy eaters," the space agency added.
NASA stated that in a galaxy with a dormant black hole at its core, such an event only occurs a few times in 1,00,000 years. The researchers studied the final moments of the life of a star that got too close to a black hole nearly 300 million light-years away and was devoured, emitting a burst of light which includes hydrogen, carbon, etc in an event known as AT2022dsb.
They focus on the radiation that is arriving through the accretion disc itself, though some of the radiation emitted by these events shoots away in the form of jets. The team used the Hubble Telescope to examine ultraviolet light emitted by the star, breaking it down into its constituent wavelengths to determine which had been absorbed. This enabled them to determine the types of components that were present and get information about what is taking place inside the hot chaos surrounding the black hole.
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| image credit: NASA |
Emily Engelthaler of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said, "However, there are still very few tidal events that are observed in ultraviolet light given the observing time. This is really unfortunate because there's a lot of information that you can get from the ultraviolet spectra." She continued, "We're excited because we can get these details about what the debris is doing. The tidal event can tell us a lot about a black hole."
According to the interpretation of the Hubble spectroscopic data, the star is now a highly bright, hot, donut-shaped region of gas. A black hole is located in the centre of the region, which is the size of the solar system and is known as a torus.
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