What happens when a star comes too close to a black hole? Astronomer Igor Andreoni from the University of Maryland (UMD) explains that the black hole's gravitational tidal forces will violently rip the star apart then pieces of the star are captured into the spinning dark orbiting the black hole. Lastly, the black hole consumes the leftover of the doomed star.
This phenomenon is not always observable, so a rare sighting of the luminous jet from a dying star encountering a black hole caught the attention of scientists. More so, the leftover of the star was launched via relativistic jets toward Earth.
Observing Rare Tidal Disruption Event
Scientists who were using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) have witnessed a black hole more than 8.5 billion light-years away gorging on a star. It is the farthest distance that astronomers have observed such a phenomenon called a tidal disruption (TDE).
TDE occurs when unwilling stars went too close to a black hole and are gorged by the cosmic monster's powerful and destructive gravity despite the star's incredible mass, Futurism reported.
It is extremely rare to observe a TDE, which is why it was fortuitous that the jets of the black hole were pointing toward the direction of Earth. If it were not for it, then astronomers at the Zwicky Transient Facility would not be able to observe it in February. The observation also prompted other researchers to aim 21 telescopes at observatories across the who world toward the black hole's direction.
Astronomers initially expected a gamma ray burst when they first spotted the TDE. A gamma ray burst is one of the brightest and most energetic explosions of energy in the cosmos.
Astrophysicist Dheeraj Pasham from MIT, one of the co-authors of the Nature Astronomy paper, said in a press release that the event was 100 times more powerful than most gamma ray burst afterglow, which is extraordinary.
Pasham estimated that the black hole needs to consume about half of the star's mass each year for the jet to sustain being that bright. He describes this voracious activity as a "hyper-feeding frenzy."
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Black Hole Releases Relativistic Jets
They were able to spot the feeding frenzy of the black hole because of the leftovers that were ejected via relativistic jets pointed toward Earth, which led to the publication of two studies in the journals Nature and Nature Astronomy.
According to SciTech Daily, relativistic jets are beams of matter traveling close to the speed of light. Andreoni first observed it in February this year and published a study on November 30.
Assistant Professor Michael Coughlin from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities said that the last time scientists observed one of these jets was over a decade ago. They estimated that relativistic jets are only released in 1% of TDEs, making AT 2022cmc an extremely rare cosmic event.
Before AT 2022cmc, only two jetted TDEs were discovered and the last one was in 2012. Since then, astronomers have been using new methods to find more of these events. They used ground-based optical surveys or general maps of the sky, as well as a wide-field sky survey.
From the ZTF survey, scientists developed open-source data to store and mine important information about atypical events in real time. It is equivalent to a million pages of information every night which makes it easier to detect TDE.
Follow-up observation reveals that AT 2022cmc was at the center of a galaxy that scientists could not pinpoint yet as it is outshone by the light from the jets. But perhaps future observations by the Hubble or James Webb Space Telescopes will unveil its galaxy.
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