The supermassive black hole absorbed the star, tore it apart, and expelled a single halo of light from its center.
In a scientific research report published on Wednesday, astronomers say that a previously unknown black hole became known to observers when a star got too close and was swallowed up.
Astronomers then observed a glassy stream of “afterglow” from the disaster, which experts call a Tidal Disruption Event (TDE), heading straight for Earth.
“The event began when an ill-fated star entered a supermassive black hole (SMBH) in an almost parabolic trajectory and was thrown into a stream of gaseous debris,” the scientific paper read on Nov. 30. the mass remained bound to the black hole, underwent general relativistic apsidal precession as the gas regressed to the pericenter, and subsequently produced strong shocks at the transition point itself.”
Astronomers shocked by the black hole ‘burps’ from the star
Scientists said the beam of light – AT2022cmc, or “infrared/optical/ultraviolet light curve” – was initially red before fading over four days and changing to a blue color.
The astronomers added: “Optical and ultraviolet observations of a fast red flame” quickly passing to a “slow blue plateau” as a study of two components generated by the tidal disruption: relativistic jets and a thermal component from interstellar debris bound into the black hole.
The remnants of the giant were so brilliantly bright that astronomers detected TDE from a dwarf galaxy millions of light-years away.
The paper added: “Observations of similar light at other wavelengths, including X-ray, submillimetre and radio, support the interpretation of AT2022cmc as containing a glass TDE synchrotron.”
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TDE was discovered in February 2022, before the Journal of Scientific News accepted a paper about it in April 2022, and the research was finally accepted in October 2022.
TDEs have been observed before, such as AT 20XXneh in June 2020.
The Herschel Space Observatory has shown that galaxies with the most powerful, active, supermassive black holes in their cores produce fewer stars than galaxies with less active black holes.
(Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Ryan J. Foley, co-author and UC Santa Cruz astronomer, said this initial discovery paves the way for astronomers to find other TDEs and new dwarf galaxies.
“This discovery has created widespread excitement because we can use tidal disruption events not only to find more intermediate-mass black holes in quiescent galaxies, but also to measure their masses,” Foley said in a scientific paper co-published on November 10.
The discovery was made after years of distant research as the distant galaxy was first observed in June 2020, and confirmed by data from the Young Supernova Experiment. It was observed again from July 1, 2020, to July 17, 2020; then from August 5, 2020 to September 6, 2020.
“During the 24 months of YSE operations, we observed only one AT 2020neh-like event, monitoring the fields for about 6 months each. This equates to one event per year within the YSE observational volume,” reads the scientific paper.
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These unique discoveries may even further lead to discoveries in distant galaxies that are otherwise hidden without visible light from the explosion.
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