The Hubble Space Telescope spotted a star stripped and stretched into a donut shape as a black hole devours it.
The supermassive black holelocated 300 million light-years from Earth in the core of galaxy ESO 583-G004, it grabbed and crushed the star after it wandered too close, sending out a powerful beam of ultraviolet light that astronomers used to locate the encounter violence.
When a black hole feeds, its immense gravity exerts powerful tidal forces on the hapless star. As the star is tilted closer and closer to the mouth of the black hole, the gravity affecting the regions of the star closer to the black hole is much stronger than that acting on the far side of the star. This difference “spaghettiizes” the star into a long, noodle-like string that wraps tightly around the black hole layer by layer—like spaghetti around a fork.
This hot plasma donut rapidly accelerates around the black hole and spins in an enormous jet of energy and matter, which produces a distinctive bright flash that optical, X-ray and radio wave telescopes can detect.
The exceptional brightness of this black hole feeding session allowed astronomers to study it over a longer period of time than is typical for tidal disruption events. This could provide exciting new insights into the ill-fated star’s final moments, the researchers said.
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“We’re looking somewhere around the edge of that doughnut,” Peter Maksym, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a NASA statement (opens in a new tab). “We see a stellar wind from the black hole sweeping across the surface, which is projected toward us at speeds of 20 million miles per hour (three percent of the speed of light). Indeed, we are still thinking about the event.”
For a star, spaghettification is a dramatic process. The star’s outer atmospheric layers are stripped first. They then surrounded the black hole to form the tight ball of threads the researchers observed. The rest of the star soon follows, accelerating around the black hole. Despite black holes’ reputation as voracious eaters, most of the star’s matter will escape; only 1% of a typical star is ever swallowed by a black hole, Live Science previously reported.
The results were reported at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle this week.