NASA recently made a groundbreaking discovery, capturing a supermassive black hole tearing apart a star and using the energy generated to destroy another star. This extraordinary event, which had long puzzled astronomers, was observed using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes.
A team of international astrophysicists, led by Queen’s University Belfast, has unlocked two cosmic mysteries that have baffled scientists for years. The first mystery involves “tidal disruption events” (TDEs), where an object strays too close to a black hole and gets ripped apart in a sudden burst of light. The second mystery revolves around “quasi-periodic eruptions” (QPEs), bright flashes of X-rays emanating from galaxies’ centres, believed to be linked to supermassive black holes but without a clear understanding of the connection.
Dheeraj Pasham from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology described the discovery as solving two mysteries at once, stating, “It’s like getting a cosmic two-for-one in terms of solving mysteries.” By utilising data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, and NASA’s Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), the team observed that the remnants of a star torn apart by a black hole formed a disc-shaped “stellar graveyard.”
Over time, the disc expanded to the extent that it began colliding with a nearby star, triggering spectacular bursts of gas and X-rays each time the star passed through the disc. This groundbreaking observation definitively linked TDEs to QPEs, providing crucial insights into the periodic eruptions happening in galaxies’ centres.
Andrew Mummery from Oxford University remarked on the significance of this breakthrough, highlighting the need to observe the eruptions a few years after a star is torn apart to understand the time required for the disc to spread out and encounter another star. The findings of this discovery were published in the journal Nature under the title ‘Quasi-periodic X-ray eruptions years after a nearby tidal disruption event’.
The research sheds light on the enigmatic connection between the destruction of stars by black holes and the subsequent impacts on neighbouring stars, offering a deeper understanding of the mechanisms at play in our vast universe.