First exposure! This star orbits a black hole in a spaghetti-like shape

Astronomers have observed a massive black hole devouring a spaghetti-shaped star.

A black hole tears a star apart, leaving behind a long trail of stellar material that then wraps itself around the black hole.

(Source: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss)

Scientists have detected filaments of matter surrounding a supermassive black hole for the first time, suggesting that a star trapped by the black hole's gravity has just been destroyed by "spaghetti-ification."

Astronomers think this effect, often called tidal disruption, occurs because the black hole's gravity pulls more strongly on the side of the star that's closer to the black hole. The black hole first tears the star apart and then sucks in matter from it, shredding the star into a long filament in the process. Until now, the only evidence of stars dying violent deaths too close to the center of a galaxy has come from short bursts of electromagnetic radiation that astronomers occasionally observe from supermassive black holes. However, scientists have never seen evidence of an actual physical filament from a star near a black hole until now.

In the study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of astronomers from the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON) and Radboud University in the Netherlands have managed to detect such a spaghetti-shaped star in the absorption lines of the spectrum near the poles of a distant black hole. Absorption lines are anomalous dark lines detected in the continuous spectrum of electromagnetic radiation emitted by a certain source, in this case a black hole. These lines appear when matter that absorbs part of the electromagnetic radiation (in this case the spaghetti-shaped star) obscures the source.

Astronomers observed absorption lines in the spectrum when looking at the black hole's rotation pole. The observations infer that there is a strand of material wrapped around the black hole many times, like a ball of cotton wool, the scientists said in a statement. The team believes that this material is stars that were torn apart while rotating around the black hole and then disappeared into the black hole. Accretion disks are known to exist near the equator of a black hole. The disk, composed of matter attracted by the black hole but not yet swallowed by it, rotates around the equator at very high speeds, releasing heat, X-rays and gamma rays in the process.

"The absorption lines are very narrow," said Giacomo Cannizzaro, the paper's lead author. "They are not broadened by the Doppler effect, as you would expect when looking at a spinning disk." The Doppler effect is caused by the rapid motion of matter in the accretion disk, which stretches or contracts electromagnetic waves depending on whether the source is moving toward or away from the observer. As a result, the light from the part of the accretion disk that is facing away from Earth would be brighter, but scientists saw no evidence of this.

The researchers also said in the statement that they knew they were looking at the black hole's pole because they could detect X-rays. "The accretion disk is the only part of the black hole system that emits this radiation," the statement said. "If we were looking from the side, we wouldn't see X-rays from the accretion disk."

Supermassive black holes, millions or even billions of times more massive than our sun, are believed to lurk at the centers of most galaxies.

They grow for billions of years, devouring anything that falls into their gravitational embrace. Astronomers can detect black holes because they emit bright X-rays as they devour surrounding gas and matter.

Stars orbiting at the center of a galaxy may occasionally wander so close to a black hole that they are captured by its gravity, being pulled closer and closer until they die an untimely death in the form of spaghetti.

Related knowledge

A black hole is a region of spacetime that exhibits such an extremely strong gravitational pull that no particles, not even electromagnetic radiation such as light, can escape. General relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can warp spacetime to form a black hole; the boundary from which escape is impossible is called the event horizon. Although the event horizon has a huge impact on the fate and conditions of objects that cross it, observations of the region seem to fail to detect any signatures. In many ways, a black hole is like an ideal black body; it reflects no light.

BY:Tereza Pultarova

FY: Dragon City D Brother

Original source: https://www.space.com/spaghettified-star-observed-near-black-hole

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