While it isn’t the new kid on the block anymore, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is still capturing amazing spectacles, most recently a black hole turning a star into the shape of a donut.
The telescope detailed the final moments of the star, as NASA shared in a release that the black hole turned it into a “donut shape” as it consumed it.
As a star gets close to a black hole, it is ripped apart violently, and the radiation from the star is spewed out, creating a “tidal disruption event,” according to NASA.
The star in question, AT2022dsb, was located approximately 300 million light-years away, and astronomers are using Hubble to better understand what happens when a star encounters a black hole. The ultraviolet tools on the telescope have allowed astronomers to study the light from the “stellar snacking event.”
There have been around 100 tidal disruption events around black holes detected by astronomers making the event extremely rare. NASA shared that a star being torn apart in a galaxy with a quiescent supermassive black hole at the center only happens a few times every 100,000 years.
Part of what makes identifying the events difficult is how long they last and the tools used to capture them, Peter Maksym shared in NASA’s release. However, this collision was captured because of how early it was caught, thanks to it being close to Earth and bright enough.
“Typically, these events are hard to observe. You get maybe a few observations at the beginning of the disruption when it’s really bright. Our program is different in that it is designed to look at a few tidal events over a year to see what happens,” Maksym of the Center for Astrophysics shared. “We saw this early enough that we could observe it at these very intense black hole accretion stages. We saw the accretion rate drop as it turned to a trickle over time.”
The AT2022dsb tidal disruption event was first caught by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae, a group of ground-based telescopes, on March 1, 2022.
As for what capturing the event means, Maksym shared that many are still trying to comprehend what they’ve captured.
“We really are still getting our heads around the event. You shred the star and then it’s got this material that’s making its way into the black hole,” Maksym said. “And so you’ve got models where you think you know what is going on, and then you’ve got what you actually see. This is an exciting place for scientists to be: right at the interface of the known and the unknown.”
The results of the discovery were shared during the American Astronomical Society’s 241st meeting.
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