The black hole almost definitely did not eat any other stars or blast out any other material in the intervening time, Cendes says. About two years after the tidal disruption event, an extraordinarily bright plume of material suddenly began to blast away from the black hole at speeds up to half the speed of light. In this case, observing later on paid off. “Normally when we observe a tidal disruption, about 20 per cent of the time you see an outflow in the first few months, and if you don’t see anything, radio telescope time is precious, so you move on and look at new things.” “The action usually happens in the first few months,” says Cendes. Sometimes that disc blasts out a spray of material shortly after the star is shredded.Ĭarlo Rovelli: Where does the stuff that falls into a black hole go? Usually in tidal disruption events, the powerful gravity of the black hole rips up a star that strayed too close, and then the star’s remains are dragged into a halo of debris called an accretion disc before falling into the black hole. Then, in 2020, 20, another team of researchers led by Yvette Cendes at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts took another look using several radio telescopes. In 2018, astronomers saw evidence of a black hole more than 650 million light years away ripping apart a star in what’s called a tidal disruption event. The delay between the cosmic meal and the blast of plasma that followed surprised astronomers, and they aren’t sure why it took so long. A supermassive black hole spaghettifies and gobbles down a star in this artist’s illustrationĪ black hole devoured a star, and two years later released a belch of titanic proportions.
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