Black hole releases ‘burps’ after two years of shredding a star

Every day new discoveries about the universe are made, since for humans, all the events that surely occur in that environment still represent an enigma. It is impressive to realize that in reality we do not know much more than what experts have managed to discover throughout the history of our civilization.

Now specialists are intrigued why a black hole is exhibiting unusual behavior. Two years after shredding a star, it released energy from the little star when it usually only takes about a couple of months to do so.

This discovery was made by a team of experts led by Yvette Cendes, who is an astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, as well as the lead author of the paper. We have never seen this before to this degree.

I wanted to be an astronomer since I was 13 years old. Making this discovery has been the greatest thrill of my life. It was definitely a lot of work and I had a lot of great collaborators who helped me pull this off. It was very, very rewarding. This has been amazing.

The team of researchers realized what was happening when they used a powerful radio telescope facility, the Very Large Array, in New Mexico, with which they were able to observe two dozen black holes that had crushed stars after they approached each other. to them. Such phenomena are called tidal disruption events (TDEs).

There’s a point where you get too close to a black hole and you can’t escape it anymore, that’s called the event horizon. But this material never crossed that limit, according to our best estimates.

The experts found that one of the TDEs, which was named AT2018hyz, was emitting energy at an unusual rate and at a very surprising time, more than two years after the event, when it is more common to see radio emissions from black holes within the first few months after swallowing a star.

Also, the energy emitted in this case doesn’t quite match what astronomers have seen, since in perhaps 99 percent of cases, the outflow is lower in energy. Whereas just one percent of that outflow is much more. Therefore it is usually an extremely accelerated event, a very rare occurrence.

It’s the first case where we’ve seen this kind of speed associated with this event or this kind of output, because it’s in the middle, about half the speed of light. The best estimate we have is that about two years after this black hole ate the star this outflow began.

For theorists, this is really exciting because it’s opening up a new dimension in our understanding of physics and what’s possible.