Thu. Mar 28th, 2024

Scientists have observed the after eruptions of a black hole consuming a star for the first time ever. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory reported that this is the first time it has “directly imaged the formation and expansion of a fast-moving jet of material ejected when the powerful gravity of a supermassive black hole ripped apart a star that wandered too close to it”. With the help of radio and infrared telescopes which included the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) scientists saw the eruptions in a pair of colliding galaxies called Arp 299. Arp 299 is said to be approximately 150 million light-years away from Earth.

The black hole was at the core of one of the galaxies and it is said to be 20 million times more massive than the Sun. Although scientists have presumed that these eruptions might be common but only a few of them have been detected. They are called tidal disruption events (TDEs). Miguel Perez-Torres, from the Astrophysical Institute of Andalusia in Granada, Spain said, “Never before have we been able to directly observe the formation and evolution of a jet from one of these events”. Scientists have made these observations and collected data for the past decade with the VLBA, some other radio telescopes and the European VLBI Network (EVN) and it showed the source of the emission expanding only in one direction.

These supermassive black holes aren’t a rarity. A lot of galaxies have them. These black holes pull matter inside them and form a sort of disc when they are doing it. Mostly these black holes do not prey upon massive stars but now that scientists have observed one such event, they have some general idea about how the black holes engulf stars. They also said that such events could be the key to understanding the conditions in which galaxies developed millions of years ago since it is probable that these would have been common in the distant Universe. But how did scientists know that such an event could be taking place somewhere in the distant Universe? Well on January 30, 2005, scientists detected an infrared emission emerging from the nucleus of one the galaxies in Arp 299 using the William Herschel Telescope. Then they, with the help of the VLBA  detected a new source of radio emission from the same location on July 17, 2005.

By Purnima

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