Black holes don't hunt; they gather. They wait patiently for a helpless star to pass by. When the star is sufficiently close, the black hole's gravitational pull violently tears it apart, sluggishly consumes its gasses, and emits intense radiation.
Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have captured a star's final moments as it is swallowed up by a black hole in detail."Events of tide disruption" are the name given to these instances. On the other hand, the language conceals the brutality and complexity of a black hole encounter. The black hole's gravity pulls stuff from stars into it and the radiation that blows it out are in balance. In other words, black holes consume mess. Astronomers are using Hubble to find out exactly what happens when a straying star enters the gravitational abyss.
Hubble is unable to get a close-up view of the chaos brought on by the AT2022dsb tidal event because the munched-up star is nearly 300 million light-years away at the core of the galaxy ESO 583-G004. However, the powerful ultraviolet sensitivity of Hubble was used by astronomers to investigate the shredded star's light, which contains hydrogen, carbon, and other elements. Forensic evidence regarding the black hole murder is revealed by the spectroscopy.
Astronomers have identified approximately 100 tidal disruptions in the vicinity of black holes using a variety of telescopes. According to a recent report, a second black hole tidal disruption event in a different galaxy was observed by a number of NASA's high-energy space observatories on March 1, 2021. The data were gathered using X-ray light from a very hot corona that formed around the black hole after the star had already been torn apart, in contrast to the observations made by Hubble.
"However, very few tidal events can be observed in ultraviolet light despite the observation time. "This is really unfortunate because there is a lot of information that you can get from the ultraviolet spectra," stated Emily Engelthaler of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We are delighted to have access to these particulars regarding the actions of the debris. The tidal event can reveal a lot about a black hole. Over the course of a few days or months, the condition of the sinking star is getting worse.
For any given galaxy with an active supermassive black hole, it is estimated that the stellar shredding only occurs a few times every 100,000 years.
This AT2022dsb stellar snacking event was first observed on March 1, 2022, by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN, or "Assassin," a network of ground-based telescopes that searches the extragalactic sky approximately once per week for violent, variable, and transient events that shape our universe. Due to the energetic collision's proximity to Earth and brightness, the Hubble astronomers were able to perform ultraviolet spectroscopy over a longer period of time than is typical.
"It is difficult to observe these events most of the time. You might get a few observations at the beginning of the disruption if it's really bright. "Our program is different in that it is designed to look at a few tidal events over the course of a year to see what happens," stated Peter Maksym of the CfA. "We saw this early enough that we could observe it at these very intense black hole accretion stages." We observed a decrease in the accretion rate as it decreased to a trickle over time."
The source was identified by the Hubble spectroscopic data as a very bright, hot, donut-shaped region of gas that once contained the star. The size of the solar system is represented by a black hole in the middle of this region, called a torus.
"We're looking somewhere on the edge of that donut. "We're seeing a stellar wind sweeping over the surface from the black hole that is being projected toward us at speeds of 20 million miles per hour, which is 3% the speed of light," Maksym asserts. In fact, we are still trying to understand what happened. Material that is entering the black hole is contained within the shredded star. As a result, there are models and actual images that give the impression that you are aware of the situation. This is an exciting location for scientists: right in the middle of the known and the unknown."
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