One of the most fascinating objects in outer space just became even more compelling and mysterious.
An international team led by researchers at University of California, Santa Cruz, the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen and Washington State University witnessed a black hole devour a lonesome star, “shredding” it, causing a distinct, luminous flare, UC Santa Cruz’s Nov. 10 news release said.
The brutal feast, or “tidal disruption event,” was captured in a dwarf galaxy 850 million light-years away by the Young Supernova Experiment (YSE), a survey that tracks cosmic explosions and “astrophysical transients”: extreme, destructive events in the dark corners of outer space.
In the news release, university staff broke it down into simpler terms, explaining that “an intermediate-mass black hole lurking undetected in a dwarf galaxy revealed itself to astronomers when it gobbled up an unlucky star that strayed too close.” Black holes are so difficult to detect, telescopes that pick up X-rays or light can’t even capture them, according to NASA. However, imagery taken for the first time in 2019 shows that they appear to be dark objects encircled by hot, glowing matter.
“We are in what I call the era of celestial cinematography,” said Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, a UC Santa Cruz professor who studies the “violent universe,” in a phone call to SFGATE. While YSE has helped capture hundreds, if not thousands of supernovae, he said, stumbling across a midsize black hole digesting a star was a pleasant surprise.
“We haven’t really found many of these smaller mass black holes, these elusive intermediate-mass black holes,” he said.
“This was something that we were not expecting,” Ramirez-Ruiz laughed.
A rendering of an unfortunate star stumbling into a black hole’s path.
University of California Santa Cruz/Lick ObservatoryThese “exciting and unusual” disruption events are rare, he added. Researchers would need to survey 100,000 galaxies to see just one per year. However, discovering them is significant because they might illuminate some of astronomy’s most pressing questions — namely, how supermassive black holes in the center of large galaxies are made, Ramirez-Ruiz said. Even our own Milky Way galaxy has one of these behemoths at its core, according to NASA.
Indeed, 2022 has been quite a year for black holes.
In June, researchers at UC Berkeley gathered potential evidence of a ghost-like “free-floating” black hole drifting in space. Considered “one of the most exotic phenomena in astrophysics,” these objects have rightfully captured the hearts of researchers across California.
Ramirez-Ruiz says that YSE will continue monitoring galaxies for more cosmic events.