Washington (Reuters) – Astronomers observed the calamious result of a star who chose the wrong dance partner. They documented what seems to be a new type of supernova, how the star explosions, which occurred when a massive star tried to swallow a black hole with which he had been involved in a long Pas de Deux.
The star, which was at least 10 times the mass of our sun, and the black hole, which had a similar mass, were gravitally linked to each other in what is called the binary system. But as the distance that separated them gradually diminished, the immense gravitational force of the black hole seems to have distorted the star-stretching it out of its spherical form-and sucked material before causing its explosion.
“We took a massive star stuck in a fatal tango with a black hole,” said astrophysicist Alexander Gagliano, from the US Institute and fundamental interactions of the US National Science Foundation, located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, co -author of the study published this week at Astrophysical Journal.
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“After losing mass for years in a death spiral with the black hole, the massive star reached its end with an explosion. She released more energy in a second than the sun in her entire life,” added Gagliano.
The explosion occurred about 700 million light years from Earth. A light year is the distance that light travels in one year, or 9.5 trillion kilometers.
“The gravitational forces of the two objects were indeed similar because we thought they had similar masses. But the star was much larger and so it was in the process of swallowing the black hole as the black hole removed material from inside it. The star was large but swollen, and the black hole was small but powerful. In the end, the black hole won,” Gagliano said.
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The researchers are not sure of the exact mechanism that caused the supernova.
“It is unclear whether distortion triggers an instability that leads to the star’s collapse, and then the remaining star material is quickly consumed by the black hole, or if the black hole completely pulls the star before it becomes supernova,” Harvard University and the study’s leading author Ashley Villar said.
“The star was pulled and transformed by the black hole in complex ways,” added Villar.
The binary system began with two massive stars orbiting each other as cosmic companions. But one of the two stars came to the end of its natural life cycle and exploded in a supernova, and its core collapsed to form a black hole, an extraordinarily dense object with gravity so strong that not even light can not escape.
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“This event reveals that some supernoves can be triggered by black holes that accompany them, which gives us new perceptions about how some stars end their lives,” said Villar.
The stars that have at least eight times the sun’s mass seem to end their lives with a supernova. Those with dough at least 20 times larger than the sun will form a black hole after the explosion.
An artificial intelligence algorithm designed to look for unusual explosions in the cosmos in real time first detected the beginning of the explosion, providing an alert that allowed astronomers to perform observations immediately. By the time the explosion was completed, it had already been observed by several terrestrial and spatial telescopes.
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“Our AI algorithm allowed us to launch a comprehensive observational study in advance enough to really see the full picture for the first time,” said Gagliano.
Star remarks dating from four years before Supernova revealed brilliant emissions that astronomers believe were caused when the black hole swallowed the star’s sucked material. For example, the star’s external layer of the star seems to have been torn off, exposing the helium layer below.
The researchers observed brilliant emissions following the explosion as the black hole consumed the remains of star debris. In the end, the black hole became massive and more powerful.
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Systems that group two or more companions are quite common. Some of these multiples have a black hole as one of the companions.
“Our conclusion is that the destination of the stars is incredibly impacted by their mate – or companions – in life. This event gives us an exciting window to the way black holes can drastically affect the death of massive stars,” said Gagliano.
Por Will Dunham
