ULTRA-powerful black holes can suck down stars like spaghetti and tear them to shreds, a new animation reveals.
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, features a black hole at its heart that occasionally chows down on nearby stars.
The action sends bursts of energy exploding forth like firecrackers in what is known as a tidal disruption event.
A study published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters has produced the most detailed simulations of the process, showing how it evolves over a year.
Lead author Daniel Price, professor of astrophysics at Monash University in Australia, describes black holes as “messy eaters.”
Their extreme forces turn compact stars into “spaghetti,” stretching them into long, narrow strands.
Surprisingly, most of the material from the mangled star isn’t sucked down – rather, it is blown into space.
Half of the matter from a star is drawn towards the hole, but just 1% is swallowed.
Researchers simulated the resulting cosmic “belch,” which appears on screen as a billow of colors.
Black holes have long been a subject of fascination, both for physicists and the general public.
To date, it is unclear what happens inside a black hole. Some far-flung theories propose alternate universes and time warps.
Even known concepts like tidal disruption events are difficult to study.
Astronomers Jack Hills and Martin Rees first proposed these “burps” in the late 20th century.
Rees predicted half of the debris from the star would remain bound to the black hole rather than being flung into space.
It would collide with itself to form a scalding hot swirl of matter called an accretion disc that would emit X-rays.
However, this theory didn’t appear to pan out. Scientists have observed over 100 potential tidal disruption events, and most have glowed at visible wavelengths.
This means the debris is warmed to a mere 10,000 degrees Celsius. While unimaginably hot for a person, this is the surface temperature of a moderately warm star.
This result puzzled researchers, as it was significantly cooler than the millions of degrees they anticipated.
Scientists reached another unexpected result.
Despite being slightly bigger than our Sun, a million-solar-mass black hole can produce a glowing ball of matter that dwarfs the entire Solar System.
The huge cluster of material expands rapidly away from the black hole, “extending to hundreds of astronomical units.”
Astrophysicists have speculated that this material must smother a black hole during a tidal disruption event. Only this, they figured, could explain the absence of X-ray emissions.
Despite their best efforts, scientists struggled to model how the process panned out.
That is, until the latest simulations were released, showing how a black hole bends the laws of physics in real time.
The videos are the first to show tidal disruption events from the moment a star is consumed to the final “burp.”
“Simulating the subsequent feeding of the black hole with disrupted material has proved challenging because of the range of timescales involved,” the authors wrote.
“Here we report a set of simulations that capture the relativistic disruption of the star, followed by one year of evolution of the returning debris stream.”
Here's what you need to know...
What is an event horizon?
What is a singularity?
How are black holes created?
