This is how NASA captured this unusual event

Outer space isn’t just about the gorgeous photos arriving in Spain. yes, Snapshots left by space telescopes Like James Webb is absolutely incredible, but sometimes Scientific and technological discoveries Referring to what is above our heads They outshine everything. Now, NASA claims to have observed “unusually closely” how massive a black hole is destroy a star

NASA reports a tidal disturbance event that occurred in a galaxy with a central black hole about 10 million times the mass of our Sun. “The fifth closest example of a black hole destroying a star”it states NASA in a statement.

Everything picked up. Thank you to NASA’s NuSTAR satellite, capable of monitoring X-ray energy from astrophysical sources for nuclear spectroscopy. This is, according to the agency, the most sensitive space telescope capable of observing these wavelengths, achieving a close convergence that provided “unprecedented insight into the formation and evolution of the corona,” according to a study published in the journal. Astrophysical Journal.

A black hole devouring stars

The event occurred about 250 million light-years from Earth, which is the distance from which NASA telescopes can record the event. Astronomers noticed that at the moment when the gravity of the black hole completely destroyed the star a significant increase in x-ray light, Classified as high energy, around a black hole.

The first time this situation was recorded was in March 2021 by ZTF or Zwicky Transit Facility, It is located at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California. The event was subsequently studied by NASA’s NICER Observatory’s Neil Gehryls telescope.

The side of the star closest to the black hole Literally pulled harder from the side that was farther away, pulling everything apart and leaving “a long noodle of hot gas,” according to NASA. According to scientists, this stream will be fed around the black hole, only to collide with itself.

At that very moment, the shocks create shock waves and the gas flows outward. that generate visible light, So are invisible wavelengths (ultraviolet or X-rays, for example). Matter settles into a disk that orbits the black hole, and friction results in the process Generates low energy x-rays. This series of events took place in just 100 days.

300 days after AT2021ehb was discovered, NuSTAR proceeded to monitor the system. The satellite detected the corona, “a cloud of hot plasma or gas atoms from which electrons have been stripped.”

Scientists were surprised by the state of the corona, as it usually appears with jets of gas shooting in opposite directions from the black hole. in the event These planes did not happen. Scientists do not know where the plasma comes from or how it heats up.

According to Yuhan Yao, a graduate student at Caltech in Pasadena, California and lead author of the study, this is unprecedented. “We’ve never seen an X-ray emitting tidal disturbance event like this but without an aircraft, which is really amazing because it means it’s possible.” We will be able to find out the causes of the jets and the causes of the corona.”

Yao also details that the observations about the event “are consistent with the idea that magnetic fields have something to do with the way the corona is created, and we want to know what makes this magnetic field so strong.” The student is trying to study these events first with the ZTF and then with telescopes like Swift, NICER, or NuSTAR.

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But why is it so important? This work details the process of destroying a star by a black hole, and can be used to “better understand what happens to matter captured by one of these giants before it devours it completely,” says NASA.

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