A massive black hole has been slowly destryoing a star for the last 10 years. And it is still an ongoing process.
According to research, a massive black hole could well be beating the record for the longest meal ever. Estimates show that it has been slowly eating a star. And this action has been going on for around 10 years.
Black holes are well known for being one of the most destructive space elements. An object swallowed up could be completely destroyed by such an unfortunate meeting. And a black hole’s victim could be any space object. From a tiny spacecraft to a star twice the size of the Sun.
Which actually seems to be the case. At least according to a recent study. A star twice as big as the sun is reportedly being swallowed up by a massive black hole. And this latter seems to be taking its sweet time. The slow destruction seems to have been going on for about 10 years now.
The meeting behind a planet and a black hole’s event horizon is known as TDE. This is the tidal disruption event. Quite a few such events have been spotted throughout the years. And most were seen to be quite short. In most cases, a TDE will last about a year.
Such events have a distinguishing mark. These are multi-wavelength X-ray flares. Such flares are produced as the stellar material starts being destroyed. As it enters the black hole, it will also heat up. When the TDE gets closer to the end, the flares it emits will also start getting fainter.
However, a newly released paper shows that the process is not always fast. Research on the matter was carried out by an international team of scientists. They were led by Dacheng Lin from the University of North Hampshire.
Study results were released earlier this week. They were published in the Nature Astronomy journal. Available online since February 06, the paper is titled as follows. “A likely decade-long sustained tidal disruption event”.
This record-breaking TDE was traced back to XJ1500+0154. This latter is a massive black hole situated some 1.8 billion light years away. The event was first spotted back in 2005. And the scientists have been tracking it ever since.
According to Lin, science has been witnessing an unexpected event. This massive black hole has been feasting on the same star for around 10 years. It is ten times longer than any previously recorded TDE.
No other such event has remained bright as long as this one. The research team based its study on data gathered by 3 orbiting telescopes. They all have X-ray detectors. One telescope is the NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory. Another is ESA’s XMM-Newton. The Swift Satellite is the third source.
Their observations were very important in gathering data about the cosmic event. And they led to the following theories. The event’s unexpected length could be explained in two possible ways.
One would be that the consumed star is massive. Estimates show that it could be twice as big as our Sun. Based on previous records, it may even be the biggest star to be involved in TDE.
The other theory states that this could be a first-time ever event. The consumed star is not necessarily big. But it may be the first to be fully and completely consumed in a TDE.
Yet, not even this process will last forever. The massive black hole could be finishing its meal sometimes over the next decades. Computer models show that its TDE flare will start diminishing in the following years. And the hole’s star supply will also drop significantly over the following decades.
Studies on this TDE may also help solve a bigger mystery. Research may be closer to establish the formation process behind supermassive black holes. Some such formations are believed to have grown very big, very fast some many billions of years ago.
Scientists believe that such formations could have already held some 1 billion solar masses. And that just about 1 billion years after the creation of the Universe.
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