![]() In a new paper in Nature Astronomy, we report our answer: a kind of turbulence driven by friction and intense gravitational and magnetic fields. We piggy-backed on NASA's asteroid defence effort to watch more than 5,000 of the fastest-growing black holes in the sky for five years, in an attempt to understand why this twinkling occurs. The brightness of the glowing discs can fluctuate from day to day, and nobody is entirely sure why. Stranger still, these black holes twinkle. The gas and stars these galactic vacuums devour are sucked into a glowing disc before their one-way trip into the hole, and these discs can shine more brightly than entire galaxies. Their mass is so great, it bends space around them so tightly that nothing can escape, even light itself.Īnd yet, despite their famous blackness, some black holes are quite visible. "This event is teaching us about the detailed physical processes of accretion and mass ejection from supermassive black holes," Edo Berger, another author of the study from Harvard University, said in the statement.Black holes are bizarre things, even by the standards of astronomers. It could help improve our understanding of how black holes interact with the material that surrounds them. The tidal disruption event in the study-dubbed "AT2019qiz"-is the nearest to Earth ever discovered, providing an unprecedented insight into this phenomenon. In this case, the scientists observed dust and debris from the star being sucked in to the accretion disk of the black hole, just before it was ripped apart. The researchers said about half of the mass of the star was captured into what's known as an accretion disk around the black hole, while the other half was ejected outwards in a powerful jet of material that traveled up to around 22 million miles per hour.Īn accretion disk is a hot, thin, rotating structure consisting of matter that is falling into the black hole. The black hole in question has a mass about one million times that of the sun. But this is exactly what happens in a tidal disruption event," Matt Nicholl, lead author of the study from the University of Birmingham, U.K., said in a statement. "The idea of a black hole 'sucking in' a nearby star sounds like science fiction. This is what happened to a star around 215 million light-years away that has been documented in a study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.Ī team of scientists observed a powerful flash of light last year that was produced by a supermassive black hole devouring the star. Stars can also experience "spaghettification" during what astrophysicists call "tidal disruption events." This is when stars stray too close to supermassive black holes and are ripped apart by its extreme gravitational forces. ![]() The term "spaghettification" has been in use since at least the late 1970s and also appears in Stephen Hawking's well-known book A Brief History of Time, which was first published in 1988. "This would result in them being stretched out vertically, rather like stretching dough to form spaghetti-this is what 'spaghettification' means." "If a human were to approach close enough to a black hole, feet-first for example, the force of gravity increases so much that the gravity at their feet would be much greater than the force of gravity at their head," Morgan Hollis, a spokesperson for the Royal Astronomical Society in the U.K., told Newsweek in an email. The Closest Black Hole to Earth Has Been Discovered by Scientists.Astronomers Spot Biggest Explosion in Universe Since Big Bang.Flash From Black Hole Milky Way's Heart Lit up Vast Stream of Gas.
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