The black hole that tore the star to pieces in 2018 is now showing increased activity in the radio range. This indicates that it just burped out the remains of it. Scientists are pondering why this happened.
Black hole “burps up” the remnants of the star
In 2018, a black hole located at a distance of 665 light years from us tore a star to pieces. This event is quite ordinary for modern astronomy. Often after that, the singularity “burps up” part of the mass of the absorbed object at high speed, which is accompanied by intense electromagnetic radiation.
But immediately after the event, which was called AT2018hyz, nothing like this was observed. And now, almost four years later, a Very Large Array (VLA) set of antennas in New Mexico has recorded a burst of radio waves, the source of which is this particular black hole. The strangeness lies in the fact that scientists are sure that over the past time it has not destroyed any other stars.
From here they concluded that we are now witnessing the release of a substance that over the years this black hole has not been able to absorb. But why this happened, scientists still cannot say with certainty.
How black holes “eat” stars
When a star approaches a black hole, the gravitational forces of the latter begin to pull out large and long strips of matter flying into space from it and are mainly directed towards an invisible monster.
And the black hole continues to tear out more and more ribbons from the star, gradually turning it into “spaghetti”, gradually falling on the “killer”. However, the space monster cannot absorb it completely, so it “burps up” part of the material at a speed of about 10 percent of the light.
In the case of AT2018hyz, the star was quite small. Its mass was only 10 percent of the solar one. But for some reason, the black hole could not “swallow” it in four years and “burped” it into space at a speed of 50 percent of the speed of light.
Scientists suggest paying more attention to the study of such absorption of stars by black holes. It is quite possible that such events are commonplace for them, they just haven’t been observed for such a long period of time before.
According to phys.org
Follow us on Twitter to get the most interesting space news in time
https://twitter.com/ust_magazine