Hubble photographed stars being swallowed by black holes and twisted into donuts

As we all know, black holes have super phagocytosis, whether it is stars, planets or other matter, as long as they are close to the black hole, they will be mercilessly sucked in, and even light cannot escape the "clutches" of black holes. When a star is close enough to a black hole to be captured by its gravitational field, the star is violently shredded, emitting intense radiation and eventually slowly swallowed up.

Astronomers, using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, have recorded in detail the final moments of a star being swallowed up by a black hole.

Source: NASA, European Space Agency (ESA), Leah Hustak (from the Institute of Space Telescope Science, or STScI)

The sequenced artist diagram above shows how a black hole devours a star passing nearby. 1. An ordinary star passes near a supermassive black hole located at the center of a galaxy. 2. The star's outer gas is captured by the gravitational field of the black hole. 3. The star is torn apart by the strong tidal force of the black hole. 4. Stellar debris is pulled into its "doughnut" shaped ring orbit by the black hole, and is eventually swallowed by the black hole, releasing a large amount of light and high-energy radiation.

This is known as tidal disruption events (TDE). But the wording masks the complex, primitive violence that black holes experience. There is a balance between the gravity of a black hole that draws in stellar matter and radiation ejects it. Astronomers are using the Hubble Space Telescope to find out the details of what happens when a star falls into the gravitational abyss of a black hole.

The Hubble Space Telescope was unable to get a close-up picture of the chaos of AT2022dsb tidal collapse event because the swallowed star is located in the core of the ESO 583-G004 galaxy, nearly 300 million light-years away. However, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope's high sensitivity to ultraviolet light from torn stars, including hydrogen and carbon, and its spectroscopy provided clues to the details of black holes engulfing stars. Astronomers have detected about 100 tidal collapse events around black holes through various space telescopes. A recent NASA report revealed that several of its telescopes detected another black hole tidal disintegration event in other galaxies on March 1, 2021. Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope observatory, data is collected from the extremely hot corona around the black hole. The black hole corona formed after the star had been shredded.

Emily Engelthaler, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said: "However, considering the observation time, tidal disintegration events observed under ultraviolet light are still rare. This is really unfortunate because we can actually get a lot of information from the ultraviolet spectrum. Excitingly, we can get more details about the process that stellar debris goes through. Tidal disintegration events can tell us a lot about black holes. "Changes in the condition of stars engulfed by black holes occur over a period of days or months.

For any galaxy with a static supermassive black hole in the center of its galaxy, star tearing occurs only about a few times every 100,000 years.

The AT2022dsb stag engulfing event was first captured by the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN) on March 1, 2022. ASAS-SN is a network of 20 telescopes around the world surveying the extragalactic universe at a frequency of about once a week in search of violent, volatile, instantaneous events that are shaping the universe. The high-energy collision was close enough and bright enough to allow astronomers on the Hubble Space Telescope mission to perform ultraviolet spectroscopy over a longer period of time than usual.

Peter Maksym, from the CfA, said: "Typically, such events are difficult to observe. It is generally possible to make some observations when the initial phase is very bright. What's different about our mission plan is that our mission is designed to observe several tidal events over the course of a year to see what happens. We realized early on that we could make observations during very intense black hole accretion phases. We found that over time, the accretion rate decreased, gradually becoming a 'trickle'. ”

According to the mission team, the Hubble Space Telescope's spectral data comes from a very bright, hot, doughnut-shaped region of gas that was once a star. The region, known as the Torus, is about the size of the solar system and revolves around a black hole at its center.

Maksym said: "We're looking at an area at the edge of the doughnut. We found stellar winds from black holes passing over the surface, shooting at us at speeds of 20 million miles per hour (3% of the speed of light). We are still scratching our heads over this incident. The star was shredded, and its material then entered the black hole. Based on what we know, we already have some models, and we actually observe some events. For scientists, it is precisely at the intersection of the known and the unknown that it is exciting. ”

The results were presented at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington.

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Source:

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/hubble-finds-hungry-black-hole-twisting-captured-star-into-donut-shape