Talk about a cosmic disruptor: Astronomers have seen a black hole hit a star, and now they’re using the remains of that destroyed star to hit other stars or small black holes nearby.
These super-scale playground antics are a rare type of tidal disruption event, which occurs when an object gets too close to a black hole. These particle tidal disruption events suggest that certain types of X-ray bursts are related to the behavior of black holes. Studying these events—and others like them—can help astrophysicists understand the extreme environments around supermassive black holes, as well as the inhabitants of those environments.
Recently, a team of astronomers and astrophysicists studying soft X-ray bursts discovered a link between such bursts and tidal disruption events. X-ray bursts are quasi-periodic eruptions (QPEs)—X-ray bursts often seen originating from the core of galaxies—that occur after a tidal disruption event called AT2019qiz, which astronomers discovered in 2019. studying hole tidal disruption events black recently published their findings in Alam.
“There was growing speculation that these phenomena were related, and now we have found proof,” said study co-author Dheeraj Pasham, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s like getting a two-for-one cosmic solution in terms of solving the mystery.”
Tidal disruption events illustrate how a black hole’s strong gravity pulls material from nearby objects, such as stars. If the star is very close, the black hole will drive it into oblivion, a process called spaghettification. After the star disintegrates, its material continues to orbit the black hole, a terrible spoils of war for much more massive objects.
The team recently followed up on previous observations of AT2019qiz in 2023, when it collected ultraviolet and X-ray data on the phenomenon using the Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. The team was able to determine the approximate size of the supermassive black hole’s accretion disk—the collection of powdery matter that surrounds the object.
“This is a major breakthrough in our understanding of the origins of these regular eruptions,” said Andrew Mummery, an astrophysicist at Oxford University and one of the paper’s authors, in the same release. “We now realize that we need to wait several years for an eruption to ‘fire’ after a star is torn apart because the disk needs time to spread far enough to encounter another star.”
With each new discovery about these extreme astrophysical environments, scientists are getting better at characterizing the parties involved, from stars to accretion disks to the black holes themselves. Many surprises are sure to await; earlier this yearanother team witnessed a supermassive black hole come to life after five years of relative calm.
We may also see a large amount of new information about black holes as future gravitational wave observatories—i.e Einstein Telescope and the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA—come online. Improving our understanding of black holes and the ripples in space-time they cause could revolutionize our understanding of the universe, from the total number of black holes to how these objects seed and grow, to their role in shaping the universe itself.
