Space
Mysterious behavior of a black hole: swallowed a star and spit it out 3 years later
Astronomers have discovered a black hole mysteriously spewing out pieces of an engulfed star a few years after it was consumed.
The event, which scientists have classified as AT2018hyz, began in 2018 when astronomers saw a black hole grab an unfortunate star with its strong gravitational pull before tearing it apart.
Then, three years later, in 2021, a radio telescope in New Mexico picked up a signal indicating unusual activity – a black hole began to erupt a star at half the speed of light.
Black holes have previously been seen to devour stars before regurgitating them, but so far, the ejection has only occurred during the “eating”. The researchers used four ground-based observatories around the world and two space-based observatories to record the event.
The scientists’ work was published in The Astrophysical Journal.
“It took us by surprise — no one had ever seen anything like it before,” said the lead author, an astrophysicist at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Yvette Sendes.
The absorption of a star by a black hole is called a tidal disruption event (TDE) because of the powerful tidal forces that act on the star due to the black hole’s gravity.
As the star pulls closer and closer to the black hole’s mouth, the black hole’s tidal forces strip and stretch the star layer by layer; turning it into a long, noodle-like thread that wraps tightly around the black hole like spaghetti around a fork, forming a ball of hot plasma. This is known as spaghettification.
This plasma rapidly accelerates around the black hole and turns into a huge jet of energy and matter, which produces a characteristic bright flash that can be detected by optical, X-ray and radio wave telescopes.
But AT2018hyz is unusual: not only has it waited three years after swallowing a star to emit a flare, but the speed of material ejected from its mouth is staggering. Most TDE streams move at 10% the speed of light, but the ejected stellar matter of AT2018hyz moves at 50% the speed of light.
“We have been studying TDEs with radio telescopes for over a decade and occasionally find them glowing in radio waves as they erupt material when the star is first being swallowed up by the black hole. But there was radio silence in AT2018hyz for the first three years, and now it has brightened up dramatically and has become one of the brightest TDEs ever observed,” said Edo Berger, co-author of the study, professor of astronomy at Harvard University.
Scientists aren’t sure what causes the flash delay, but they think the delay may be more common than previously thought. To test if this is the case, astronomers will need to look at the sources of other TDEs previously thought to be out of commission to see if they can catch their flare again.
A former US Air Force fighter pilot asserts that he has deciphered
the method behind the extraordinary maneuvers of UFOs, reports dailystar.co.uk.
Over
the past two decades, numerous military encounters with these enigmatic
crafts have been reported, prompting a significant investigation by the
Pentagon.
One of the most renowned sightings occurred during the
USS Nimitz encounter, where fighter pilots witnessed a UFO descending
from 28,000 feet to just above sea level in less than a second.
This
astonishing movement would imply that the craft reached a staggering
speed of 19,000 miles per hour, a velocity that would be fatal to any
human pilot.
According
to Chris Lehto, a former USAF pilot, the craft exhibits two key
characteristics: it moves without inertia, essentially lacking weight,
and it accelerates at an incredibly rapid pace without affecting its
surroundings.
Image: NATO Allied Air Command/Facebook
Chris
believes that the explanation lies within a technology that seems
straight out of science fiction. He proposes that the answer to the UFO
enigma lies in the Alcubierre Drive, a theoretical interstellar engine
conceptualized by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994.
The
Alcubierre Drive employs a form of “space warp” technology, reminiscent
of what has been depicted in episodes of Star Trek. By bending space, a
craft inside a “warp bubble” could potentially travel at or even
surpass the speed of light without violating the known laws of physics.
While
the Alcubierre Drive remains a hypothetical concept with challenges to
overcome, Chris notes that the required energy is no longer believed to
be unattainably large.
Patents
filed with the US patent office outline the potential workings of the
drive, as well as another groundbreaking technology theorized by
American aerospace engineer Salvatore Pais.
Pais suggests that
high-powered rotating magnets could theoretically eliminate an object’s
inertia, and he has filed a patent for a starship based on this
principle.
However, Chris maintains skepticism regarding Pais’
theory. He explains that while Pais’s patent applications for the US
Navy attracted attention for their potential energy-related
applications, doubts have been raised about their feasibility. There is
speculation that they may be scams, pseudoscience, or disinformation
intended to mislead adversaries of the United States.
Alternatively,
rival theories propose that the “Tic Tac” UFO is a classified Pentagon
project testing similar advanced technologies discussed by Chris.
Scientists say they have found evidence of a new Earth-like
planet that has suddenly appeared in our Solar System and is orbiting
the Sun.
Physicists, including those from the National Astronomical Observatory
of Japan, said the planet is likely to be the mysterious ‘Planet Nine’
that was hypothesised to exist in the far outer edges of the Solar
System.
Several studies in the past have suggested there is likely an
undiscovered planet beyond the Kuiper Belt – a stellar disk of materials
such as asteroids, space rocks, comets around the Sun in the outer
Solar System past the orbit of Neptune.
Independent.co.uk reports: In the new research, published recently in The Astronomical Journal, scientists
found that some of the objects in the Kuiper Belt behave in a way
indicative of the presence of a small planet among them.
One such object, they said, is about 500 astronomical units (AU) from
the Sun, where 1 AU is the distance between the Sun and the Earth.
In comparison Neptune is at a distance of 30 AUs from the Sun.
Some of these were also found to have “odd” orbits suggesting they
are being pull by the gravity of a cosmic entity larger than those that
typically influence such objects.
Computer simulations run by the scientists indicate that the most
likely explanation for the observations was another hidden planet in the
Kuiper Belt.
“We predict the existence of an Earth-like planet,” researchers wrote in the study.
“It is plausible that a primordial planetary body could survive in
the distant Kuiper Belt as a Kuiper Belt planet (KBP), as many such
bodies existed in the early solar system,” they added.
If such a planet exists, researchers say it would have a mass about
1.5 to 3 times that of Earth with an inclination of about 30 degrees.
They say the theorised planet’s orbit would likely place it between 250 and 500 AU from the Sun.
Researchers say the discovery of such a planet close to the Kuiper
Belt can unravel new constraints on planet formation and evolution.
“In conclusion, the results of the KBP scenario support the existence
of a yet-undiscovered planet in the far outer solar system,” scientists
noted.
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