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The Unpredictable Survival of Stars When Torn by a Black Hole

ESO/M. Grain fairs

This illustration depicts a star (in the foreground) spaghettified as it was sucked in by a supermassive black hole (in the background) during a ‘tidal disturbance event’.

Nationalgeographic.co.id – Hundreds of millions of light years away in a distant galaxy, an orbiting star supermassive black hole is being torn apart under the black hole’s immense gravitational pull. As the star was ripped apart, the remnants turned into streams of debris that showered down on the black hole to form a disk of super-hot, super-bright material that swirled around the black hole. This disc is known as the accretion disk.

The phenomenon in which a star is crushed by a supermassive black hole and triggers a glowing accretion flare is known as a tidal disturbance event (TDE), and it is thought that a TDE occurs approximately once every 10,000 to 100,000 years in certain galaxies.

With luminosities that exceed entire galaxies (billions of times brighter than our Sun) for short periods of time (months to years), accretion events allow astrophysicists to study supermassive black holes from cosmological distances. Thus providing a window into the central regions of galaxies that are quiescent—or inactive.

By investigating these “strong gravity” events, for which Einstein’s general theory of relativity is so important for determining how matter behaves, TDE yields information about one of the most extreme environments in the universe: the event horizon (point of no return) of black holes.

EFT is usually “once-and-done” because gravity field extremes of supermassive black holes destroying stars. This means that the supermassive black hole fades back into darkness following an accretion flare. However, in some cases, a high-density stellar core can survive gravitational interactions with a supermassive black hole, allowing it to orbit the black hole more than once. Researchers call this partial repetitive TDE.

A team of physicists, including lead author Thomas Wevers, Fellow of the European Southern Observatory, and co-author Eric Coughlin, assistant professor of physics at Syracuse University, and Dheeraj R. “DJ” Pasham, research scientist at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, have proposed a model for repeated partial TDEs.

Their findings have been published in Astrophysical Journal Letters dengan judul makalah “Live to Die Another Day: The Rebrightening of AT 2018fyk as a Repeating Partial Tidal Disruption Event.”

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This illustration shows a stream of glowing matter from a star as it is being devoured by a supermassive black hole in a tidal disturbance flare.  When a star passes a certain distance from the black hole - close enough to be gravitationally disturbed - the star's material dissolves

NASA/JPL-Caltech

This illustration shows a stream of glowing matter from a star as it is being devoured by a supermassive black hole in a tidal disturbance flare. When a star passes a certain distance from the black hole – close enough to be gravitationally disturbed – the star’s material dissolves

The paper describes the capture of a star by a supermassive black hole, the stripping of matter each time the star approaches the black hole, and the delay between when the matter is stripped and when it is eaten by the black hole again. The team’s work is the first to develop and use a detailed model of repeated partial TDEs to explain observations, make predictions about the nature of star orbits in distant galaxies, and understand the process of partial tidal perturbation.

The team is studying a TDE known as AT2018fyk (AT stands for “Astrophysical Transient”). The star was captured by the supermassive black hole through an exchange process known as “Hills capture,” in which the star was originally part of a binary system (two stars orbiting each other under the mutual gravitational pull) that was torn apart by the gravitational field of the hole. black. Another (uncaptured) star ejected from the center of the galaxy at a speed comparable to ~1,000 km/s, is known as a star. hypervelocity.

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