An Oxford University doctor has praised a “huge breakthrough” after a mystery surrounding black holes was solved.
A massive black hole has torn apart one star and is now using that stellar wreckage to pummel another star or smaller black hole.
This discovery has solved a mystery which had perplexed astronomers for years.
The breakthrough was made by an international team of astrophysicists, led by Queen’s University Belfast, using Nasa’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other state-of-the-art telescopes.
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The new evidence helps astronomers conclusively link two mysteries where there had previously only been hints of a connection.
In 2019, astronomers witnessed the signal of a star that got too close to a black hole and was destroyed by the black hole’s gravitational forces.
Once shredded, the star’s remains began circling the black hole in a disc shape in a type of “stellar graveyard”.
Over a few years, however, this disc has expanded outwards and is now directly in the path of a star, or possibly a stellar-mass black hole, orbiting the massive black hole at a previously safe distance.
The orbiting star is now repeatedly crashing through the debris disc, about once every 48 hours, as it circles.
Spectacular light shows and bursts of X-rays are then caused.
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Lead author Dr Matt Nicholl, of Queen’s University Belfast, said: “Imagine a diver repeatedly going into a pool and creating a splash every time she enters the water.
“The star in this comparison is like the diver and the disc is the pool, and each time the star strikes the surface it creates a huge ‘splash’ of gas and X-rays.
“As the star orbits around the black hole, it does this over and over again.”
Co-author Dr Andrew Mummery, of Oxford University, said: “This is a huge breakthrough in our understanding of the origin of these regular eruptions.
“We now realise we need to wait a few years for the eruptions to ‘turn on’ after a star has been torn apart because it takes some time for the disc to spread out far enough to encounter another star.”
Scientists have long documented many cases where an object gets too close to a black hole and gets torn apart in a single burst of light. Astronomers call these “tidal disruption events” (TDEs).
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In recent years, astronomers have additionally discovered a new class of bright flashes from the centres of galaxies, which are detected only in X-rays and repeat many times.
These events are also connected to supermassive black holes, but astronomers could not explain what caused the semi-regular bursts of X-rays.
Co-author Dr Dheeraj Pasham, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said: “There had been feverish speculation that these phenomena were connected, and now we’ve discovered the proof that they are.
“It’s like getting a cosmic two-for-one in terms of solving mysteries.”
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