![]() ![]() The accretion disk is like “water circling the drain of a bathtub,” explains Nicholas Stone. Scientists had never caught a TDE so early. The episode is called a tidal disruption event, or TDE. This animation illustrates what happens when a star strays too near a black hole: It gets torn apart. In the end, it formed a spiraling ring of glowing, hot gas. The rest looped around the black hole, crashing into itself. This is called “spaghettification.” Some of the shredded stellar guts were spit back into space. Eventually the star was stretched into a long strand of gas. If such an event happened in the Milky Way, it would be so bright that it could probably be seen during the day.Īs the star was drawn in by the black hole, it was pulled apart by the black hole’s intense gravity. “So this was outshining every other star in its galaxy,” Holoien says. A typical galaxy contains around a billion or 10 billion stars. It released about 30 billion times the energy of our sun. That’s the earliest observation of a tidal disruption event yet. He’s an astronomer at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif. “We were able to see exactly when it started to get brighter,” says Thomas Holoien. It showed the stellar material brightening as it began circling the black hole. These are planets that orbit stars outside of Earth’s solar system. The flare came from a galaxy around 375 million light-years from Earth.Īs it happened, that patch of sky also was being watched by NASA’s TESS satellite. Researchers then turned to other instruments for a better look. These are violent explosions that mark the death of massive stars. They had been searching the sky for supernovas. The first clues that scientists saw from ASASSN-19bt came from robotic telescopes. ![]()
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