Hubble has recorded the terrifying end of a star being ripped apart and devoured by a black hole – the Enseñame de Ciencia

The Hubble Space Telescope has just detected a black hole hungry while twisting an unfortunate star. Black holes violently trap everything within their reach, causing intense flashes of light, until everything that crosses the event horizon disappears forever.

Recently, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured in detail the moment when a black hole engulfed an unlucky star, located 300 million light-years away in the heart of galaxy ESO 583- G004. The last moments of the life of a star that got too close and was pulled in by the powerful gravitational pull of a black hole.

Contrary to popular belief, wormholes do not work like vacuum cleaners sucking in everything in their path, but simply eat what they can attract; That is, black holes will only swallow objects that get close enough for their gravitational force to eventually violently tear them apart. When matter is drawn into a black hole, not all of it ends up behind the event horizon (the boundary separating the black hole from the rest of the universe), but much of it is ejected at full speed, releasing a large amount of radiation that can be picked up by observatories.

The tidal event, formally designated AT2022dsb, describes the violent final scenario of a star being pulled to the bottom of a black hole which is known as a “tidal wave”. Astronomers call black holes “gatherers, not hunters,” as well as chaotic eaters. It’s more complicated behavior than it sounds, and Hubble is being used to learn more about the intricate endgame of a star being torn apart as it sinks into gravity well.

The legendary Hubble has a strong view, but it still can’t image up close the havoc created by the tidal event AT2022dsb, the shattered star nearly 300 million light-years away. However, using Hubble’s ultraviolet sensitivity, astronomers can study fragmented starlight, which includes hydrogen, carbon, and more.

This is not the first time an event of this kind has been captured, in fact, there have been at least a hundred detections of tidal disturbances around black holes using various telescopes. “However, there are still very few tidal events observed in UV given the time of observation. This is really unfortunate because there is so much information that can be gained from UV spectra.” he said in a statement Emily Engelthaler of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“We’re excited that we can get these details about what the debris is doing. The tidal event can tell us a lot about the black hole.” Changes in the condition of the stricken star occur in the order of days or months.

As explained by NASA collaboratorsThis stellar event, AT2022dsb, was first imaged on March 1, 2022 by the Automated Supernovae Sky Survey (ASAS-SN, or “Killer”), a network of ground-based telescopes that surveys the extragalactic sky about once a week in the search for violent and variable events. and transients that make up our universe. Because this energetic collision occurred so close to Earth and was bright enough that astronomers were able to perform ultraviolet spectroscopy with Hubble, luckily the brightness was so intense that tracking was possible for much longer than expected.

The results were presented at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society.which was held in Seattle (Washington).