Astronomers capture a black hole devouring a star in a ‘overfeeding frenzy’

Earlier this year, astronomers caught an unusually bright signal in the X-ray, optical and radio systems, dubbed AT 2022cmc. They have now determined that the most likely source of this signal is a supermassive black hole devouring a star in a “hyperfeeding frenzy,” spewing jets of matter in what is known as a tidal disturbance event (TDE). according to new leaf Published in the journal Nature Astronomy, it is one of the record books: the to the maximum extent like that So far, it’s roughly 8.5 billion light-years away.

The authors estimate that the jet from TDE is traveling at 99.99 percent of the speed of light, which means the black hole is really rocking its stellar reconfiguration. “It is probably devouring the star at a rate of half the mass of the sun per year,” said co-author Dheeraj “DJ” Pasham from the University of Birmingham. “A lot of tidal disruption occurs early on, and we were able to detect this event at the very beginning, within one week of the black hole starting to feed on the star.”

as we are I mentioned earlierIt is a common misconception that black holes behave Like cosmic vacuum cleanersThey greedily absorb any substance in their surroundings. In fact, only objects beyond the event horizon – including light – are swallowed up and cannot escape, although black holes are also chaotic eaters. This means that part of the body’s matter is expelled in a powerful jet.

If this object is a star, the process of tearing it apart (or “ripping”) by the powerful gravitational forces of the black hole occurs outside the event horizon, and part of the star’s original mass is violently ejected outward. And this, in turn, can be formed rotating ring of matter (aka accumulator disc) around the black hole that emits powerful X-rays and visible light – and sometimes radio waves. Physicist John Wheeler once described flowing TDEs as “a tube of toothpaste sticking tightly around its middle,” with material squirting out at either end. TDE is one way that astronomers can indirectly infer the presence of a black hole.

For example, in 2018, astronomers announced First live photo The fallout from a star being ripped apart by a black hole 20 million times more massive than our Sun is in a pair of colliding galaxies called Arp 299, about 150 million light-years from Earth. A year later, astronomers scored The final death throes from a star shredded by a supermassive black hole, called AT 2019qiz, which provided the first direct evidence that gas flowing during turbulence and accretion produces powerful light and radio emissions previously observed. In January, astronomers detected a second TDE candidate in the radio system (dubbed J1533+2727) in archival data collected by the Very Large Array (VLA) telescope in New Mexico.

Astronomers first spotted it at 2022 cc in February and Immediately transformed Multiple telescopes work across a wide range of wavelengths toward the source. These instruments included an X-ray telescope aboard the International Space Station called the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER). The bright signal—calculated as the equivalent of light from 1,000 trillion suns—could have been a gamma-ray burst from the collapse of a massive star. But the data revealed a source 100 times more powerful than the most powerful gamma-ray burst known.

“Our spectrum told us the source was hot: about 30,000 degrees, which is typical for a TDE,” said co-author Matt Nicholl from the University of Birmingham. “But we also saw some absorption of light by the galaxy where this event occurred. These absorption lines were shifted dramatically toward red wavelengths, telling us that this galaxy was much further away than we expected.”

Due to AT 2022cmc’s brightness and longer duration, astronomers have concluded that it must be powered by a supermassive black hole. The X-ray data also indicated an “extreme accumulation episode”. That’s when a vortex of debris forms when the unfortunate star falls into the black hole. But the brightness was still a surprise, given the source’s distance from Earth. The authors attribute this to something called “Doppler enhancement,” which happens when the plane heads straight toward the ground, much like how a passing siren is amplified. AT 2022cmc is the fourth Doppler-only-enhanced TDE to date; The last one was unveiled in 2011.

DOI: Nature Astronomy, 2022. 10.1038 / s41550-022-01820-x (About DOIs).