Skip to main content

NASA Missions Uncover Black Hole Destroying One Star While Targeting Another.

 



NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, along with other telescopes, has discovered a supermassive black hole that has shredded a star and is now using the remnants to strike another star or smaller black hole. This finding bridges two cosmic enigmas and sheds light on the environments surrounding the largest black holes.


An artist’s illustration depicts a disk of material, created when the supermassive black hole (on the right) tore apart a star with its intense tidal forces. Over several years, this disk expanded and intersected with another object—either a star or a small black hole—orbiting the giant black hole. Each collision generates bursts of X-rays, detected by Chandra. The inset includes Chandra's data (in purple) alongside an optical image from Pan-STARRS (in red, green, and blue).


In 2019, an optical telescope in California observed a burst of light, later classified as a “tidal disruption event” (TDE), where a black hole tears apart a star that strays too close. This event was named AT2019qiz.


Simultaneously, scientists were tracking “quasi-periodic eruptions” (QPEs), brief and regular bursts of X-rays near supermassive black holes. The new study suggests a link between TDEs and QPEs, proposing that QPEs are generated when objects collide with the disk created by TDEs.


In 2023, astronomers used both Chandra and Hubble to analyze the debris after the tidal disruption event concluded. Chandra’s observations, taken over 14 hours, revealed a weak signal in the first and last segments but a strong signal in the middle, highlighting the dynamic nature of these cosmic phenomena.




Researchers utilized NASA’s Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) to monitor AT2019qiz for repeated X-ray bursts, revealing that it erupts approximately every 48 hours. This finding was confirmed with data from NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and India’s AstroSat telescope.


Additionally, ultraviolet data from Hubble, collected alongside Chandra’s observations, allowed scientists to measure the size of the disk surrounding the supermassive black hole. They discovered that if any object orbits the black hole in about a week or less, it would inevitably collide with the disk, triggering eruptions.


These findings have significant implications for the search for more quasi-periodic eruptions linked to tidal disruptions. Identifying additional instances would enable astronomers to assess the prevalence and distances of objects in close orbits around supermassive black holes, many of which could serve as excellent targets for future gravitational wave observatories.


The study detailing these results was published in the October 9, 2024, issue of *Nature*, with Matt Nicholl from Queen’s University Belfast as the first author. The complete list of authors is available in the paper, accessible online at https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.02181.


NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program, with science operations controlled by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations in Burlington, Massachusetts.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

James Webb Space Telescope Opens New Frontiers in the Search for Life Beyond Earth.

  This image illustrates a science-based artist’s impression of K2-18 b, a potentially habitable exoplanet 120 light-years away, orbiting a cool dwarf star in its habitable zone. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is revolutionizing the search for life beyond our solar system, offering humanity its most detailed look yet at distant, potentially habitable worlds. With its extraordinary infrared capabilities, Webb is not only detecting atmospheres on small rocky exoplanets but also probing their chemical makeup in search of biosignatures—clues that could hint at the presence of life. However, scientists caution that context is everything. Atmospheric data alone is not enough to confirm life; understanding a planet’s surface, interior, and broader environment is essential. Even detecting a potential biosignature, such as a gas possibly produced by biological processes, doesn’t equate to discovery. Multiple, independent lines of evidence would be needed to confirm such a find. “F...
Post a Comment
Read more

Webb Telescope Reveals Tangled Rings and Dusty Chaos in Dying Star System NGC 1514.

  NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the most detailed image yet of planetary nebula NGC 1514, revealing clumpy dust rings and clear holes in its vibrant pink core using mid-infrared light. A dying star’s final performance has been brought into sharp focus by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, revealing a cosmic display of tangled rings, drifting dust, and mysterious holes in the planetary nebula NGC 1514. This mesmerizing structure lies about 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus and has been evolving for at least 4,000 years. At the heart of the nebula are two tightly bound stars, orbiting each other every nine years, their light diffracted in Webb’s images like a celestial jewel. While the stars appear as one in mid-infrared light, they are central to the nebula’s complex architecture. One of these stars, once several times the mass of our Sun, ejected its outer layers in a slow, dense stellar wind as it aged. The other star’s close approach may have twi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Astronomers have discovered a 'Death Star' black hole in action.

A team of astronomers has studied 16 supermassive black holes that are firing powerful beams into space, tracking where these beams, or jets, are pointing now and where they were aimed in the past, as reported in our latest press release. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) National Radio Astronomical Observatory’s (NRAO) Very Large Baseline Array (VLBA), they found that some of the beams have changed directions by large amounts. These two Chandra images show hot gas in the middle of the galaxy cluster Abell 478 (left) and the galaxy group NGC 5044 (right). The center of each image contains one of the sixteen black holes firing beams outwards. Each black hole is located in the center of a galaxy embedded in the hot gas. In the images below, labels and the radio images appear. Ellipses show a pair of cavities in the hot gas for Abell 478 (left), while ellipses indicate two pairs of cavities for NGC 5044 (right). These cavities were carve...
Post a Comment
Read more