Scientists Observe First Ever Black Hole ‘Burp’
Scientists have observed black holes devouring stars before, but this year marks the first time anyone has witnessed a black hole eating a star and belching out a flare of plasma as a result.
In a study published in the journal Science on Thursday, a group of astrophysicists documented the path of a star roughly the size of our sun as it was sucked into the gravitational pull of a black hole. The star did not survive the event, but the black hole did burped out the leftovers: a jet of hot energy and matter.
Hubble fellow Sjoert van Velzen from Johns Hopkins University says the event took place over the course of a few months, which is an incredibly short amount of time in the scale of the universe.
“These events are extremely rare. It’s the first time we see everything from the stellar destruction followed by the launch of a conical outflow, also called a jet, and we watched it unfold over several months.”
Scientists have recorded the radio signals left behind by black hole burps in the past, but this was the first time observing both the destruction of a star and the corresponding jet of its expulsion.
According to Eureka Alert, the black hole burp was captured, thanks to a collaborative effort between University of Oxford in Great Britain and Ohio State University, who observed the star being devoured in December 2014 using an optical telescope. Once van Velzen heard that a star was seen getting sucked into a black hole, he contacted a team of astrophysicists led by Rob Fender at the University of Oxford in the hopes of observing the aftermath. At the last minute, the team was able to witness the black hole burp using radio telescopes.
The final result was a sampling of X-ray, radio, and optical data collected by satellites and ground telescopes to depict a “multi-wavelength” picture of the black hole belch.
“The tidal disruption of a star by a supermassive black hole leads to a short-lived thermal flare,” the study claims. “We present a detection of variable radio emission from a thermal TDF, which we interpret as originating from a newly-launched jet.”
The radio observations used in this study on this particular black hole were many times more sensitive than previous recordings, which could explain why a black hole burp had never been observed until now. Every effort to catch the aftermath of a black hole chowing down on a star so far had narrowly missed the burp.
“Previous efforts to find evidence for these jets, including my own, were late to the game,” said van Velzen.
According to the Washington Post, despite all the data gathered, the event still raises a lot of unanswered questions.
“The destruction of a star by a black hole is beautifully complicated, and far from understood,” said van Velzen. “From our observations, we learn the streams of stellar debris can organize and make a jet rather quickly, which is valuable input for constructing a complete theory of these events.”
Coincidentally, NASA dubbed November 27 “Black Hole Friday” as an opportunity to educate the public about the nature of black holes. You can read more about them here. NASA reportedly provided resources that the astrophysicists needed to documented this black hole burp phenomenon.
Earlier this month, scientists also reported the first observed instance of something coming out of a black hole instead of going in. The study could reveal how black holes manage to power “some of the brightest objects in the universe.”
[Photo by NASA]
