“This is the first time that we have witnessed such a long delay between the feeding and the outflow,” Berger says. For comparison, most TDEs have an outflow that travels at 10% the speed of light, Cendes says. The outflow of material is traveling as fast as 50% the speed of light. In 20% of cases you then see a radio outflow at the part where it’s torn apart.” “This material was in an accretion disc surrounding the black hole after was unbound. Taking the conversation to Reddit, the astronomers were asked if the phenomenon was like how in a food processor, there’s a ring of material always just outside the reach of the blades. But the emission, known as an outflow, normally develops quickly after a TDE occurs, not years later. Some spaghettified material occasionally gets flung out back into space.
HAS ANYONE EVER SENT ANYTHING INTO A BLACK HOLE FULL
RELATED: Astronomers Capture Black Hole Eruption Spanning 16 Times the Full Moon in the Sky Eventually, the elongated material spirals around the black hole and heats up, creating a flash that astronomers can spot from millions of light years away.
As a star nears a black hole, gravitational forces begin to stretch, or spaghettify, the star. TDEs are well-known for emitting light when they occur. “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.” MORE ON BLACK HOLES: Hawking’s 50-Year Mystery About Falling into Black Holes Has Finally Been Solved “We have been studying TDEs with radio telescopes for more than a decade, and we sometimes find they shine in radio waves as they spew out material while the star is first being consumed by the black hole,” says Edo Berger, also at Harvard University and co-author on the new study. Radio observations of the TDE proved the most striking. The team collected observations of the TDE, dubbed AT2018hyz, in multiple wavelengths of light using the VLA, the ALMA Observatory in Chile, MeerKAT in South Africa, the Australian Telescope Compact Array in Australia, and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory in space. Cendes and the team rushed to examine the event more closely. Radio data from the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico showed that the black hole had mysteriously reanimated in June 2021. SIMILAR: This is What it Looks Like When a Black Hole Snacks on a Star The team spotted the unusual outburst while revisiting tidal disruption events (TDEs)-when encroaching stars are pulverized by black holes-that occurred over the last several years. The results, described this week in the Astrophysical Journal, may help scientists better understand black holes’ feeding behavior, which Cendes likens to “burping” after a meal. The team concludes that the black hole is now ejecting material traveling at half of the speed of light, but are unsure why the outflow was delayed by several years.
“This caught us completely by surprise-no one has ever seen anything like this before,” says Yvette Cendes, a research associate at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard and lead author of a new study analyzing the phenomenon.
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