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https://theconversation.com/astronomers-witness-the-dying-flare-of-a-star-torn-apart-by-a-black-hole-halfway-across-the-universe-195453>
"Some stars just get unlucky. There are billions of stars within a typical
galaxy. Yet once every 100,000 years or so, one of those stars will wander too
close to the supermassive black hole lurking at the galaxy’s centre and be torn
apart. These cosmic behemoths weigh in at millions to billions of times the
mass of our Sun, and their immense gravitational force can destroy an unlucky
star.
The stellar debris spirals in towards the black hole, which feeds on the
remains. However, black holes are messy eaters. In a small fraction of cases,
this stellar destruction can power an energetic jet of material that travels
outwards at almost the speed of light. If that jet is pointed directly towards
us its brightness will be boosted, in much the same way that a police siren
seems louder when the car is travelling towards us.
Modern astronomical surveys discover such stellar spaghettifications (known as
tidal disruption events) roughly once or twice every month. However, only three
of these had previously been seen to produce powerful jets, most recently in
2011.
Earlier this year we were lucky enough to spot another one of these events,
more than halfway across the Universe. As we report today in
Nature
Astronomy, our team watched it with some of the world’s best telescopes for
more than three months, getting the best view yet of the birth and development
of a black hole jet."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
