A Black Hole Detected As It Swallows A Star

As most of us know, black holes are such ‘heavy’ structures that even light cannot escape its gravitational pull. For this reason, we can only detect black holes, which we can call these ‘ghosts’ of space, by observing their effects on surrounding objects. The other day, NASA announced at a conference with the American Astronomical Society that the Hubble Space Telescope was detected ‘swallowing’ a star around a black hole.

According to the shared information and representative images, the star, which entered the orbit of the black hole, started to break down by the gravitational force of the black hole. The star, which had a tail behind it, disappeared completely as the amount of fragmentation increased and was replaced by a hot, cosmic nebula swirling around the black hole.

The stages of the black hole splitting the star were as follows:

• The star is getting too close to the black hole.
• Gases in the star’s outer atmosphere are attracted to the black hole’s gravitational pull, forming a tail.
• The star is completely shattered by the force of gravity.
• The nebula that remains of the star forms a ring-shaped nebula around the black hole. This nebula eventually sinks completely into the black hole and emits an enormous amount of light and radiation into space.

The event in question took place about 300 million light-years from Earth. Naturally, the data obtained by Hubble was not observed much like black hole-star collisions in Hollywood productions.

NASA shared a video about the discovery on the Goddard YouTube channel, but since the discovery was made by examining ultraviolet light, which the human eye cannot see, there are representative images of the event in the video.

Video shared by NASA about the discovery that the black hole swallowed the star

This event, which was recorded as AT2022dsb, was first detected on March 1, 2022, by a telescope network located on Earth within the All Space Automated Supernova Survey (ASAS SN). After the detection of the event, Hubble turned its focus in this direction and allowed more details to be obtained. So technically, the event was not newly discovered, but the details were shared after the analysis of the data collected for 1 year.

So what will this discovery do?

Peter Maksym from the Astronomical Society states that observing star-eating black holes is very difficult under normal conditions, and the difference of the new discovery at this point is that it has continued to collect data for a year. Maksym explains the event in question as the intersection of the known and the unknown. It should also be noted that data on the incident in question continues to be collected.