A Black Hole Spewed Out the Remains of One-Star Years After Consuming it

3 years earlier, in October 2018, astronomers saw a black hole consuming and ripping one star apart in a galaxy 665 million light yrs away from Earth.

Currently, just recently, the same astronomers observed the same black hole lighting the sky, despite the fact it had not sucked another star into its vicinity, one press statement reveals.

In one never-before-seen observation, the astronomers found that the black hole was ejecting, or regurgitating, the stellar product it consumed three years earlier. The new finding might help the scientific community better understand black holes’ feeding behavior and the crucial role it plays throughout the cosmos.

” Nobody has ever observed anything like this before”

A new study detailing the astronomers’ findings recommends the black hole is ejecting these stellar remnants at half the speed of light. The scientists don’t understand why it took 3 years for this to occur, and they do not know what processes would have been acted on the stellar remains throughout that time.

“This caught us completely by surprise– no person has ever observed anything like this before,” explained Yvette Cendes, one research associate at the Center for Astrophysics|Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and also lead author of the study. Cendes added that the behavior would be compared to someone “burping” after one meal.

Cendes and also her colleagues spotted the never-before-seen phenomenon while re-observing black holes that had recently consumed stars in a phenomenon known as a tidal disruption event (TDE). In radio information captured in June 2021 by the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, they observed that the black hole in question had mysteriously begun reanimating.

“We applied for Director’s Discretionary Time on multiple telescopes, that is when you find something so unexpected, you can not wait for the normal cycle of telescope proposals to observe it,” Cendes said. “All the applications were immediately accepted.”

Thanks to that fast response, the group collected information on the TDE, called AT2018hyz, in numerous wavelengths of light utilizing several state-of-the-art observatories, including the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, and also the ALMA Observatory in Chile.

A “burping” black hole

TDEs are known to emit huge amounts of light when they occur due to the product from the star stretching out and also heating up as it’s consumed. However, the emissions typically happen almost straight away– not years later.

“It’s as if this black hole has begun abruptly burping out a bunch of material from the star it consumed years back,” Cendes stated.

Next, the scientific researchers aim to investigate whether this phenomenon occurs typically but had not been observed before or if they really witnessed an incredibly unusual cosmic event in action. Follow-up studies could assist in shedding new light on the mysterious inner workings of the several black holes at the center of galaxies throughout the universe.

Read the original article on Interesting Engineering.