This discovery, made by an international team of astrophysicists led by Queen’s University Belfast, links two cosmic mysteries that have puzzled scientists for years. The first relates to what are known as “tidal disruption events” (TDE), where an object comes very close. From a black hole and is torn apart in a single burst of light.
The second concerns “quasi-periodic eruptions” (QPE), where bright flashes from the centers of galaxies are detected in the form of X-rays, which astronomers assumed were linked to supermassive black holes but were not sure how.
“There has been feverish speculation that these phenomena are interconnected, and now we have discovered evidence of this,” said Dheeraj Basham of MIT.
The team used data from NASA’s Chandra
After a few years, the debris disk expanded so much that it repeatedly collided with a nearby star that would otherwise have been safe from the black hole.
Each time the star passes through the disk, it produces stunning explosions of gas and X-rays. This demonstrated that “violent wave turbulence events” (TDE) are associated with “quasi-periodic eruptions” (QPE).
Andrew Mummery from the University of Oxford said: “This is a major advance in our understanding of the origin of these regular eruptions. “We now realize that we need to wait a few years for the explosions to start after the star ruptures because it takes some time for the disk to spread far enough to encounter another star.”
Details of this discovery were published in the journal Nature.
Source: Independent
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