Black hole ‘burps’ material from a star after three years

And black hole has removed material from a estrella which he crushed three years ago in a find that has baffled scientists.

“This took us completely by surprise, no one had seen anything like this before,” Yvette Cendes, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who led the research, said in a statement. “It’s as if this black hole it would have abruptly started belching out a bunch of material from the star it ate years ago.”

A stellar burp

In October 2018, it was noted that the black hole, Located in a galaxy 665 million light-years from Earth, it was ripping apart a star that had come too close.

This phenomenon is called a tidal disruption event (TDE). and is common among astronomers. They usually occur when objects such as stars approach the black holes and the massive gravitational influence they encounter generates tidal forces that stretch the star in one direction while crushing it in the other direction, “spaghettiing” its body.

As this material falls on the black hole, it heats up and generates a flash of light that astronomers can detect millions of light-years away. From time to time, the black hole spits some of this stellar material back into space.

However, in this new TDE called AT2018hyzthe black hole it is ejecting material at regarding 480 million kph, regarding half the speed of light. The conventional number does not exceed 10% of said speed.

“This is the first time we have witnessed such a long delay between feeding and departure,” study co-author Edo Berger, a professor of astronomy at Harvard University, said in the statement.

Investigating space meals

Astronomers detected this event while looking for signs of TDEs that have occurred in recent years. Data they collected in radio waves with the Very Large Array in New Mexico showed that this black hole had mysteriously come back to life in June 2021.

The team studied the event in multiple wavelengths of light and with a variety of telescopes, including the VLA, the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, and found that the most striking observations of AT2018hyz They were in radio frequencies.

The team will now investigate whether the delay between feeding and emission is unique to AT2018hyz or if it’s a more common event that astronomers have missed.

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