When a black hole eats up a star, an event called “stellar tidal disruption, it releases enormous amount of energy or powerful flare of light that echoes through space”.
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Passing stars that get too close to black holes end up stretching and compressing as they are swallowed by an huge gravitational force. However, dust can survive if it’s a little distance from the black hole because the radiation that spreads to it is not intense.
The technique, called photo-reverberation, allows scientists to glean new information about stellar tidal disruptions and the location of dust circles around black holes. That was to observe the variations in radiation emitted from the dust and to get more precise measurements of the flare coming from stellar tidal disruption. A team of researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China captured images of a fourth black hole integrating a star.
The black hole then devours its cosmic meal, before finally letting loose a massive, flaming cosmic belch.
Using images from the WISE telescope, launched in 2009, which can measure the infrared emissions of cosmic dust, the U.S. scientists have found at least three black holes surrounded by the radiation-charged cosmic dust, and the Chinese have found another one. This radiation is further dispersed in the Universe through dust particles, propagating infrared wavelengths. How black holes swallows a nearby star and what actually happen when the star is eaten by a black hole. It also could help them better locate the dust circles around black holes.
This illustration shows a glowing stream of material from a star as it is being devoured by a supermassive black hole in a tidal disruption flare. John Wheeler, an American astronomer, first used the term “black hole” in his lecture in 1967.
To detect tidal disruption event, researchers utilized a unique approach. The dust, which is invisible to the naked eye, forms a shell that extends a few trillion miles from the black hole, or about half a light year away.
For the first time, scientists can conduct now such studies, thanks to the WISE telescope, which launched in 2009 and is capable of measuring infrared emissions from the dust particles.
“The black hole has destroyed everything between itself and this dust shell”, van Velzen said.
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Another astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Varoujan Gorjian argued that, with the aid of the telescope, they reached to accomplish this extraordinary study. In September 2013, WISE was reactivated, renamed NEOWISE and assigned a new mission to assist NASA’s efforts to identify potentially hazardous near-Earth objects.
