![]() "Is it the lightest black hole or the heaviest neutron star we’ve ever seen?” "The reason these findings are so exciting is because we’ve never detected an object with a mass that is firmly inside the theoretical mass gap between neutron stars and black holes before," Laura Nuttall, a gravitational wave expert from the University of Portsmouth's Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, and co-author of the paper published in The Astrophysical Journal today, said in a statement. 12.įollow us on Twitter (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab). The team's findings were announced at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Wednesday, Jan. "This is an exciting place for scientists to be: Right at the interface of the known and the unknown." And so you've got models where you think you know what is going on, and then you've got what you actually see. "You shred the star and then it's got this material that's making its way into the black hole. "We really are still getting our heads around the event," Maksym concluded. The observations are taken from somewhere on the edge of the donut according to Maksym. They were also able to ascertain that this torus of gas that swirls around the black hole is around the size of our solar system. The spectroscopic data from AT2022dsb collected by Hubble was analyzed by the team who believe that it is coming from a very bright, hot, donut-shaped area of gas that was once the star's constituent material. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) Observing the edge of a cosmic donut This illustration shows a glowing stream of material from a star as it is being devoured by a supermassive black hole in a tidal disruption flare. Read more: Black holes: Everything you need to know The tidal event can tell us a lot about a black hole." "We're excited because we can get these details about what the debris is doing. The tidal event can tell us a lot about a black hole," Engelthaler added. ![]() The team's observations reveal a stellar wind sweeping toward Earth at a speed of around 3% the speed of light, or about 20 million miles per hour (approximately 32.2 million kilometers per hour).Ĭhanges in what remains of the star destroyed in the TDE AT2022dsb are occurring over a timescale of days to months, meaning that ultraviolet spectroscopy and observations of these changes can tell astronomers more about the feasting black hole. TDEs have shown astronomers that black holes are "messy eaters," meaning some of the material left over from the destruction of unfortunate stars in these feeding events will be blown out into space, possibly as jets of matter moving at incredible speeds approaching that of light. ![]() We saw the accretion rate drop as it turned to a trickle over time." "We saw this early enough that we could observe it at these very intense black hole accretion stages. Our program is different in that it is designed to look at a few tidal events over a year to see what happens," CfA researcher Peter Maksym said. You get maybe a few observations at the beginning of the disruption when it's really bright. "Typically, these events are hard to observe. Bizarre black hole is blasting a jet of plasma right at a neighboring galaxy NASA X-ray observatory reveals how black holes swallow stars and spit out matter Record breaker! Newfound black hole is closest known to Earth
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