Astronomers catch a supermassive black hole doing something they've never seen before
NASA/JPL/Caltech
Astronomers observed a supermassive black hole swallowing up a star and shooting out a flare traveling at almost the speed of light, an international team reported Thursday in the journal Science.
The energy in the jets of matter that shot out during this event are comparable to the "entire energy output of the Sun over 10 million years," James Miller-Jones, an astrophysicist at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Australia explained in a statement.
A black hole, NASA explains, is "a region in space where the pulling force of gravity is so strong that light is not able to escape."
Supermassive black holes can be as large as our solar system.
While scientists have observed certain kinds of flares from black holes before, they have never before been able to watch from start-to-finish, recording data from radio waves and many different wavelengths of light to put together a complete picture of what exactly is happening during these mysterious star-swallowing events.
"These events are extremely rare," Sjoert van Velzen, a Hubble fellow at Johns Hopkins University who led the team, said in a statement. "It's the first time we see everything from the stellar destruction followed by the launch of a conical outflow, also called a jet, and we watched it unfold over several months."
As the ICRAR release noted, this is "the first time scientists have been able to see both a disk of material falling into a black hole, known as an accretion disk, and a jet in a system of this kind."
Because the observed event was relatively close to Earth - 300 million light-years away - they were able to watch the event unfolding in much greater detail. When scientists have tried to capture this kind of event before, it's been in galaxies much farther away. That might explain, the team notes in the paper, "how these jets, if common, could thus far have escaped detection."
The new observations provide evidence that will help scientists confirm some of their theories about black holes, whose inner workings are still largely mysterious.
"The destruction of a star by a black hole is beautifully complicated, and far from understood," van Velzen said. But the new study is an important step in "constructing a complete theory of these events."
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