NASA recorded how a black hole absorbs a star. PHOTO
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Using the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, scientists have discovered a black hole that has repeatedly swallowed a Sun-like star. Fixation of such an event became possible thanks to a new method of data analysis of the satellite’s X-ray telescope (XRT), NASA writes. An astrophysicist from the University of Leicester in Great Britain and member of the Swift team led the study of the star and its “hungry” black hole, collectively known as Swift J023017.0+283603. It was published in detail on September 7 in the journal Nature Astronomy. When a star gets too close to a black hole, the gravitational forces create intense tides. They break it into a stream of gas. The leading edge revolves around the black hole, and the trailing edge goes outside the system. Photo: Neils Bohr Institute/Daniele Malesani This astronomical phenomenon is called tidal destruction. Scientists see them as flashes of multi-wavelength light – they occur when debris collides with a disk of material already orbiting the black hole. Recently, researchers have been studying variations of this phenomenon. They are called partial or repeated tidal destructions. The name fully reflects the essence, because in this case the orbiting star passes close to the black hole, the star bulges outwards, ejects material, but still survives. This process continues until it loses too much gas and eventually disintegrates. Systems of stars and black holes with certain characteristics together create a wide spectrum of behavior for classification. Swift J0230 itself was first observed on June 22, 2022 by XRT. It is located at a distance of more than 500 million light years. XRT Swift recorded 9 outbursts every few weeks since its discovery. Evan and his team believe they are seeing repeated tidal collapses from a Sun-like star orbiting a black hole with a mass 200,000 times the mass of the Sun. According to scientists’ estimates, the star loses about 3 Earth masses of its material during each tide. The discovery of Swift J0230 was made possible by a new automated search for XRT observations developed by Evans, called the Swift X-ray Transient Detector. After the instrument observes a part of the sky, the data is transmitted to the ground, and the program compares it with previous XRT images of the same location. If that part of the X-ray sky has changed, scientists are alerted. In the case of Swift J0230, Evans and his colleagues were able to quickly coordinate additional observations in the region. Swift was originally designed to study gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful energetic emissions in space. However, after the satellite was launched, scientists recognized its ability to study a range of celestial objects, such as tidal waves and comets. Previously, we talked about the discovery of the black hole closest to Earth. Read also: Black holes “throw out” the stars they once destroyed. Scientists don’t know why
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