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4 weeks ago
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A supermassive black hole with a case of 'cosmic indigestion' has been burping out the remains of a shredded star for four years, experts have discovered.
Astronomers say the radio wave jet shooting out of the black hole is a contender for one of the brightest, most energetic things ever detected in the universe.
Calculations suggest the current energy outflow is up to 100 trillion times that of the infamous super–powerful Death Star, from the Star Wars universe.
Astrophysicists have documented plenty of incidents where a star gets too close to a black hole and is shredded by its gravitational field.
But a black hole emitting this much energy so many years after chewing up a star is unprecedented.
The team even predict the stream of radio waves belching from the cosmic entity will keep increasing exponentially before peaking next year.
'This is really unusual', said Yvette Cendes, an astrophysicist at the University of Oregon, who led the work.
'I'd be hard–pressed to think of anything rising like this over such a long period of time.'
An artistic representation of the tidal disruption event, or a black hole shredding a star in a process known as 'spaghettification'
Calculations suggest the current energy outflow is up to 100 trillion times that of the infamous super–powerful Death Star, from the Star Wars universe
The process began in 2018, when a small star was ripped to shreds when it wandered too close to a black hole in a galaxy located 665 million light years from Earth.
The 'tidal disruption event' (TDE) did not come as a surprise to astronomers, who occasionally witness these violent incidents while scanning the night sky.
In this case, the gravitational tug of the black hole shredded the nearby star in a process called 'spaghettification'.
This is the extreme vertical stretching and horizontal compression of objects into long, thin shapes.
But nearly three years after the massacre the black hole began lighting up the skies, emitting large amounts of energy in the form of radio waves.
In the latest paper, Dr Cendes and her colleagues show that the energy emitted from the black hole has continued to rise sharply over the last few years – and it is now 50 times brighter than it was when originally detected.
The celestial event is officially called AT2018hyz, but the team prefer the nickname 'Jetty McJetface'.
They calculated the current energy outflow of the black hole and came up with an astounding number, putting it on a par with a gamma ray burst and potentially placing it among the most powerful single events ever detected in the universe.
The scientists found that energy outflow has increased exponentially over the last few years, as shown by this graph
Death Star, the fictional, moon–sized superweapon and space station from Star Wars, is capable of destroying planets with its kyber crystal–powered laser
What is spaghettification?
In astrophysics, spaghettification is the tidal effect caused by strong gravitational fields.
When falling towards a black hole, for example, an object is stretched in the direction of the black hole (and compressed perpendicular to it as it falls).
In effect, the object can be distorted into a long, thin version of its undistorted shape, as though being stretched like spaghetti.
Source: Astronomer Dr Ed Bloomer
To put it in sci fi terms, they worked out that the black hole is emitting at least a trillion – possibly closer to 100 trillion – times the amount of energy the Death Star would emit.
This fictional, moon–sized superweapon and space station from Star Wars is capable of destroying planets with its kyber crystal–powered laser.
The team plan to continue to track the object to see how it continues to behave in the coming years.
Back in 2022, when the team first announced something unusual was happening, co–author Edo Berger, professor of astronomy at Harvard University, said: 'We have been studying TDEs with radio telescopes for more than a decade.
'We sometimes find they shine in radio waves as they spew out material while the star is first being consumed by the black hole.
'But in AT2018hyz there was radio silence for the first three years, and now it's dramatically lit up to become one of the most radio luminous TDEs ever observed.'
Astronomers often describe black holes as 'messy eaters', as some material occasionally gets flung back out into space.
But the emission this creates, known as an outflow, normally develops quickly.
Dr Cendes at the Very Large Array, a large radio telescope facility in New Mexico that detected the phenomenon
'It's as if this black hole started abruptly burping out a bunch of material from the star it ate years ago,' Dr Cendes said.
'This caught us completely by surprise — no one has ever seen anything like this before.'
Last month, astronomers captured the moment a 'reborn' supermassive black hole awakened after 100 million years of silence.
Incredible images show the black hole erupting like a 'cosmic volcano', with enough force to reshape its entire host galaxy.
The new findings were published in the Astrophysical Journal.
BLACK HOLES HAVE A GRAVITATIONAL PULL SO STRONG NOT EVEN LIGHT CAN ESCAPE
Black holes are so dense and their gravitational pull is so strong that no form of radiation can escape them - not even light.
They act as intense sources of gravity which hoover up dust and gas around them. Their intense gravitational pull is thought to be what stars in galaxies orbit around.
How they are formed is still poorly understood. Astronomers believe they may form when a large cloud of gas up to 100,000 times bigger than the sun, collapses into a black hole.
Many of these black hole seeds then merge to form much larger supermassive black holes, which are found at the centre of every known massive galaxy.
Alternatively, a supermassive black hole seed could come from a giant star, about 100 times the sun's mass, that ultimately forms into a black hole after it runs out of fuel and collapses.
When these giant stars die, they also go 'supernova', a huge explosion that expels the matter from the outer layers of the star into deep space.
