“We’re looking somewhere on the edge of that donut. The team calls this area the torus and say this particular donut is as big as our entire solar system. We saw the accretion rate drop as it turned to a trickle over time.”Īlthough the event is too far away to see with the naked eye, scientists interpret Hubble’s data as coming from the very bright, hot, donut-shaped area of gas now swirling around the black hole. “We saw this early enough that we could observe it at these very intense black hole accretion stages. Our program is different in that it is designed to look at a few tidal events over a year to see what happens,” says Peter Maksym of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) in a media release. You get maybe a few observations at the beginning of the disruption when it’s really bright. “Typically, these events are hard to observe. It’s a network of ground telescopes which watch the sky for violent, variable, and transient events across the universe.ĭespite being 300 million light years away, scientist say it’s still close enough to Earth and bright enough for the Hubble Telescope to use its ultraviolet spectroscopy on this donut-making event. This particular event, called AT2022dsb, was first observed on March 1st, 2022 by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN or “Assassin”). Study authors say a galaxy with a supermassive black hole at the center shreds a star in this way only a few times every 100,000 years. The stellar remnants are pulled into a donut-shaped ring around the black hole, and will eventually fall into the black hole, unleashing a tremendous amount of light and high-energy radiation.Ĭredits: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI) How often do black holes turn stars into donuts? The star is shredded as tidal forces pull it apart. The star’s outer gasses are pulled into the black hole’s gravitational field. ![]() A normal star passes near a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy. This sequence of artist’s illustrations shows how a black hole can devour a bypassing star. Scientists call these stellar homicides a “tidal disruption event.” While that doesn’t sound so violent, the NASA team explains that black holes are “messy eaters,” balancing out the star matter they pull in by blowing out just as much. These include hydrogen and carbon just to name a few. Astronomers used Hubble’s powerful ultraviolet sensitivity to study the light and chemicals coming from the doomed star. The new findings from March 2022 spotted a black hole approximately 300 million light years away pulling in a local star in the galaxy ESO 583-G004. ![]() The biggest black holes are called “supermassive,” and scientists believe they sit at the heart of many galaxies.Black holes are technically invisible, so scientists really on the behavior of nearby stars to know they’re there.A black hole’s gravitational pull is so strong even light can’t escape.Black holes often form when large stars collapse and cause a supernova. ![]() Here’s what you need to know about black holes: Black holes are notorious for gobbling up nearby objects in space, and the Hubble Telescope has just spotted another cosmic meal in progress! Researchers from NASA are revealing their findings after a supermassive black hole shredded a nearby star - turning it into a “donut” the size of our solar system!
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