2023-08-29 11:00:12
Astronomers have peered into the innards of a jagged star after it got too close to a black hole. Study of its remains has revealed fascinating information about the star’s tragic fate.
This artist’s view (Is commonly called artist any person exercising one of the trades or activities…) shows the stellar debris spinning around (Around is the name that the avian nomenclature in French language (update) gives.. .) of the black hole (In astrophysics, a black hole is a massive object whose gravitational field is so intense…). The debris represents the remains of a star three times more massive (The word massive can be used as:) than our Sun (The Sun (Sol in Latin, Helios or Ήλιος in Greek) is the star…), torn by the gravity (Gravitation is one of the four fundamental interactions of physics.) of the black hole. This disturbance was named ASASSN-14li.
Credit: NASA.
Jon Miller, of the University of Michigan and leader of the study, gives us an evocative vision: “We see the innards of what was once a star. The remaining elements are clues to determine the type of star that met this tragic end.”
This phenomenon, called a tidal disruption event, and more precisely ASASSN-14li in this specific case, was particularly remarkable. Discovered in November 2014, it was the closest such event to Earth (Earth is the third planet in the Solar System in order of distance…) for a decade (A decade is equal to ten years. The term derives from the Latin words decem “ten”…), 290 million light-years away.
Credit: NASA
Brenna Mockler, co-author of the study, mentions that X-ray telescopes, such as Chandra and XMM-Newton (XMM-Newton is an artificial X-ray observation satellite.), can be used as tools to study these phenomena. By analyzing the elements near the black hole, they were able to determine that the unlucky star weighed about three times the mass of our Sun, making it the one of the most massive stars ever seen ripped apart by a black hole.
Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, another co-author, stresses the importance of this event, as measuring the mass of the destroyed star is an impressive feat. These findings offer astronomers a new method to identify the presence of stellar clusters around supermassive black holes in other distant galaxies.
The study also found that the observed elements most likely came from a single star, contradicting the idea that they could have come from gases released during earlier black hole flares.
The research was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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