Produced by: Tarun Mishra
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Astronomers using NASA's observatories and India's AstroSat have witnessed a massive black hole disrupting two celestial objects, one of which was a star. The event provides new insights into the behaviour of stellar debris around supermassive black holes.
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In 2019, a star ventured too close to a supermassive black hole and was torn apart by intense gravitational forces, a process known as a tidal disruption event (TDE). The star's remnants formed a stable accretion disk around the black hole.
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Recently, the accretion disk began interacting with a second object, likely a star or smaller black hole. Every 48 hours, this second object collides with the disk, causing bursts of X-rays as it passes through the stellar debris.
The regular X-ray bursts observed during the collisions helped astronomers connect this phenomenon to previously documented but poorly understood quasi-periodic eruptions (QPEs), which involve bright X-ray flashes from the centres of galaxies.
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NASA’s Chandra Observatory captured X-ray data from the event, known as AT2019qiz, over several hours, confirming repeated eruptions. The findings are crucial for understanding how stellar debris interacts with other objects near black holes.
NASA's NICER instrument on the International Space Station confirmed that the eruptions occurred every 48 hours, strengthening the evidence of regular interactions between the two objects and the accretion disk.
India’s AstroSat provided unique observations of the event, offering data in both X-rays and ultraviolet (UV) light. While the eruptions were only visible in X-rays, AstroSat helped determine the size of the disk and the repetitive nature of the eruptions.
Researchers emphasize that future observations with sensitive X-ray and UV instruments could further explore the nature of these eruptions, offering deeper insight into the behaviour of accretion disks and interactions near black holes.