![]() ![]() TDEs are well-known for emitting light when they occur since spaghettified material from the star becomes elongated around the black hole and heats up, creating a flash that astronomers can see millions of light-years away. This is the first time astronomers have ever observed such a phenomenon, and the team is unsure why the outflow was delayed by several years. ![]() The team concluded that this resulted from the black hole ejecting residual material from the star at relativistic speeds (a fraction of the speed of light). But in AT2018hyz there was radio silence for the first three years, and now it’s dramatically lit up to become one of the most radio-luminous TDEs ever observed.“ “We have been studying TDEs with radio telescopes for more than a decade, and we sometimes find they shine in radio waves as they spew out material while the star is first being consumed by the black hole. Credit: NASA/SwiftĪccording to Edo Berger, a professor of astronomy at Harvard University and the CfA and a co-author on the new study, the radio observations of the TDE proved to be the most striking: As Cendes explained in a CfA press release:Īrtist’s impression of a powerful outburst sparked by a magnetic reversal in a distant galaxy. To their surprise, they noticed that the black hole had mysteriously become reanimated. In June of 2021, Cendes and her colleagues examined it again using radio data from the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico. As he explained, the TDE was “unremarkable” at the time. This team was led by Sebastian Gomez, a postdoctoral fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute and co-author on the new paper. Shortly thereafter, an international team examined AT2018hyz in the visible and ultraviolet wavelengths using the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae, the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, and the UV-Optical Telescope (UVOT) on the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. ![]() In 2018, the TDE in question (dubbed AT2018hyz) was observed by astronomers at Ohio State University as part of the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN). These occur when stars pass too close to black holes and are pulled apart during multiple passes, a process known as “spaghettification” because of how the stars are ripped into strands. The paper that describes their findings recently appeared in the Astrophysical Journal.Īs they stated in their paper, the team observed the outburst while revisiting data on tidal disruption events (TDEs) that took place over the last few years. The team was led by Yvette Cendes, a research associate with the CfA, who was joined by an international team of researchers from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA), the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory, the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics, UC Berkeley, Radboud University (Netherlands), and York University in Toronto. Their findings could provide new clues about how black holes feed and grow over time. As they explained in a recent study, the black hole was shining very brightly because it was ejecting (or “burping”) leftover material from the star at half the speed of light. While astronomers have witnessed events like this before, another team from the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics noticed something unprecedented when they examined the same black hole three years later. In October 2018, astronomers witnessed one such event when observing a black hole in a galaxy located 665 million light-years from Earth. Periodically, these gravitational behemoths will devoir stars and other objects in their vicinity, releasing tremendous amounts of light and radiation. They are also of interest because they allow astronomers to observe the laws of physics under the most extreme conditions. These objects form when stars reach the end of their life cycle, blow off their outer layers, and are so gravitationally powerful that nothing (not even light) can escape their surfaces. Originally predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, black holes are the most extreme object in the known Universe. ![]()
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