Hubble observes a fraudulent black hole that devours a star

Black holes are hungry cosmos monsters: extremely dense objects that can absorb in any material that leaves very close and then devours it. Now, astronomers using the Hubble spatial telescope have observed a black hole in the act of devouring a star, shredding it and creating a large explosion.

It was this radiation explosion, called a tidal division event (TDE), which allowed researchers to identify the black hole. Tde called AT2024TVD was evident for a particularly unusual reason: while the largest supermasive black holes are located in the center of a galaxy, it was a stroller fraud.

“The classic location where you expect the massive black holes to be in a galaxy is in the center, like our Sag A* in the center of the Milky Way,” explained the main scholar Yao of UC Berkeley. “This is where people normally look for tidal breakdown events. But this is not in the center. In fact it is about 2,600 light years away. This is the first to be discovered optically discovered.”

As well as hubble, researchers also used other instruments such as NASA X-ray observatory and Nrao very large telescope to observe TDE which is illustrated above.

The black hole begins as a dark and secret object, but when a star passes too close, it is drawn from the gravity of the black hole and stretches, or, to use the technical term, “spaghetified” in an extreme shape. This leaves a cloud of the disk-like material around the black hole, and this material quickly falls into the black hole, creating a flash of X-rays at the wavelength of radio that can be observed by the soil and indicating that the black hole is not in the center of the galaxy as expected.

In fact, in this particular galaxy, it is not just a supermasive black hole, but two: one in the center of the Galaxy as well as this stroller. It is thought that this can happen when two smaller galaxies collide and join to form a larger galaxy.

“Massive black holes are always in galaxy centers, but we know that galaxies join-this is how galaxies grow. And when you have two galaxies that come together and become one, you have a lot of black holes,” said co-author Ryan Chornock, also of UC Berkeley. “Now, what happens? We expect them to finally gather, but theorists have predicted that there must be a population of black holes roaming inside galaxies.”

Researchers predict that the two supermasive black holes in this galaxy can be potentially united in the future, which would be such an epic event that would create gravitational waves that could be detected from the Earth.

The research will be published in astrophysical journal letters.