IT House news on January 15 that although humans can already observe black holes, our current understanding of such extreme objects is still very limited. Because black holes are covered by event horizons, which block our search for black holes, humans cannot currently observe the internal structure of black holes.
If black holes can devour everything, including stars and light, where will that matter end up?
NASA captured a very rare image of a black hole 300 million light-years away turning into a star eater, crushing and elongating a passing star, eventually creating a gas cloud the size of the solar system in the universe.
A NASA illustration showing the result of a star (right) encountering a black hole
Although the latest James Webb photo is more topical, this image was actually taken by Hubble. Because of luck, the star collapsed closer to the telescope than usual. As a result, astronomers can observe the event over a long period of time, which allows them to capture more data.
The black hole-swallowing event was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope last March, and NASA reported the results at an astronomical conference in Seattle this month. NASA officially refers to such events as "tidal disruption events/tidal collapse events", which is simply the story of an unsuspecting star encountering a black hole while roaming the universe.
At present, black holes are still one of the strongest beings in the known universe of mankind, and their gravity is unimaginable, and even light cannot escape. A typical black hole has a mass equivalent to about 100 suns, and some supermassive black holes can even withstand billions of suns.
IT House query found that the largest known black hole in the Milky Way is Sagittarius A*, which has a mass equivalent to 4.3 million suns, and the largest black hole detected so far is Phoenix A, which is located at the center of the Phoenix Star Cluster, about 5.7 billion light years from Earth, and its mass is comparable to 100 billion suns.
Judging from the images released by NASA, the final result of this event is that the stellar debris is pulled into a "doughnut" by the surrounding black hole, and NASA officially named it AT2022dsb.
Currently, the star is located about 300 million light-years from Earth, about the core of the ESO 583-G004 galaxy. Despite its unfathomable distances, astronomers can study AT2022dsb by analyzing the ultraviolet light emitted by stars through the range of light from their constituent elements, such as carbon and hydrogen.
The event was first discovered on March 1, 2022, by astronomers at The Ohio State University, the Supernova All-Day Automated Sky Survey (ASAS-SN) program. NASA explained that AT2022dsb is closer to Earth than other similar events, causing astronomers to have a longer observation period.
Most importantly, longer time allows scientists to use ultraviolet light to understand the doughnut, which is more detailed than what is usually studied with X-rays, which could provide astronomers with more information about the elements in the event.
▲ The stellar debris is pulled into a ring by the black hole and eventually falls into the black hole, releasing a large amount of light and high-energy radiation.