When a star is too close to a black hole, gravitational forces create intense tides.
Using the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, scientists have discovered a black hole repeatedly devouring a Sun-like star. The recording of such an event was made possible thanks to a new method of analyzing data from the satellite’s X-ray telescope (XRT), NASA reports.
An astrophysicist from the University of Leicester in the UK and a member of the Swift team led the study of the star and its hungry black hole, collectively named Swift J023017.0+283603. It was published in detail on September 7 in the journal Nature Astronomy.
When a star is too close to a black hole, gravitational forces create intense tides. They split it into a gas stream. The leading edge revolves around the black hole, and the trailing edge goes beyond the system.
This astronomical phenomenon is called tidal disruption. Scientists see them as flashes of multi-wavelength light – they happen when the debris collides with a disk of material already spinning around the black hole.
Recently, researchers have been studying the variations of this phenomenon. These are called partial or repeat tidal disruptions.
The name fully reflects the essence, because in this case the orbiting star passes close to a black hole, the star bursts out, ejecting material, but still remains.
This process continues until it loses too much gas and eventually breaks down. Systems of stars and black holes with certain properties together create a wide range of behaviors for classification.
Swift J0230 itself was first detected on June 22, 2022 with XRT. It is located at a distance of more than 500 million light years. XRT Swift has seen 9 flares every few weeks since its discovery.
Evan and his team hypothesize that they are seeing the repeated tidal disruption of a Sun-like star orbiting a black hole with a mass 200,000 times the mass of the Sun. Scientists estimate that the star loses about three Earth masses of its material at 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.
Let’s recall that earlier the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft photographed an image of a new crater on the Moon, which is likely the crash site of the Russian Luna-25 station.
Source: korrespondent
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