Astronomers have created the first-of-its-kind simulations of the process of a star being absorbed by a supermassive black hole. These are the most accurate models of the tidal destruction event.
Giant supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies occasionally devour nearby stars. During this process, the star stretches into a spaghetti-like line (this is called spaghettification) and breaks apart. This process is called a tidal destruction event. In a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomers have created first-of-its-kind simulations of how a black hole devours a star over the course of a year. ScienceAlert.
Back in the 1980s of the last century, astronomers first presented the theory that there are tidal destruction events. According to the theory, half of the torn apart star should turn into a rotating disk of glowing matter around the black hole, the accretion disk. This disk must have such a high temperature that it will emit a huge amount of X-ray radiation.
But astronomers were surprised when, much later, they discovered that during tidal disruption events, the disks emit light mostly in the optical range, not in the X-ray range. At the same time, the temperature of the matter falling into the black hole was only 10 degrees Celsius, not the millions of degrees expected from the hot gas around a supermassive black hole.
Scientists were also surprised when they learned that the size of the matter glowing around the black hole is several times larger than the solar system and is rapidly expanding away from the black hole at a speed of several percent of the speed of light. Given that even a black hole with a mass of 1 million times that of the Sun is only slightly larger than our star, the sheer size of the glowing material found in the observations came as a complete surprise to astronomers.
Astrophysicists have speculated that the black hole must somehow be squeezed by matter during a tidal collapse event, and this could explain the absence of X-rays. But so far no one has been able to show how this actually happens.
According to scientists, a supermassive black hole attracts a star to itself, which, under the influence of gravity, undergoes a spaghetti process and stretches into a long, thin thread. Half of the matter of the torn apart star falls closer to the black hole, but only 1% of the matter is absorbed by the black hole. The rest is thrown into space.
The authors of the study say that creating simulations of a tidal destruction event is difficult. Newton's laws of gravity don't work near a supermassive black hole, but if you use the strange effects of Einstein's theory of general relativity, it will work. New simulations by scientists show the entire process of a tidal collapse event: from its beginning to the ejection of unnecessary matter into a black hole.
During the study, scientists found that 1% of the matter that falls into the black hole creates so much heat that it fuels an extremely powerful ejection of matter. A black hole simply cannot absorb so much, so the rest is gradually ejected.
At the same time, simulations show that astrophysicists were right about the black hole being squeezed by matter. The simulations show that tidal collapse events do indeed look like a Solar System-sized star expanding at a few percent of the speed of light, fed by a black hole inside.
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