The Earth has about as much mass as a black hole that’s half an inch wide (about the size of a marble). Typically, things with a lot of mass are fairly spread out. They are weird regions of space out of which nothing can escape-voids in the fabric of space-time itself that are completely disconnected from the rest of reality.īut what would it be like to fall into one? Would you necessarily die? Would it feel different from falling into a regular hole? Would you discover deep secrets of the universe inside, or see time and space unfold before your very eyes? Would your eyes (or your brain) even work inside of a black hole? And we get it: black holes are mysterious. More likely, the fascination with falling into a black hole has less to do with the chances of it actually happening, and more to do with our basic curiosity about these intriguing space objects. But why is that? Are there black holes popping up everywhere in backyards across America? Are there people out there who are planning to have a picnic near one and are worried about letting their kids run around it unsupervised? It’s a common conundrum that gets covered in many science books, and it’s a question that our listeners and readers often ask us. "We've never seen a tidal disruption event with X-ray emission like this without a jet present, and that's really spectacular because it means we can potentially disentangle what causes jets and what causes coronae," says astronomer Yuhan Yao of Caltech.A lot of people seem to have this question. And this weird discrepancy, scientists say, is tremendously exciting. Yet NuSTAR's observations revealed the presence of a corona. No hint of jets had been detected by any of the observatories. So far so normal.īut, well, something was weird. The X-ray, ultraviolet, optical, and radio light emitted from the event over a period of 430 days revealed that the culprit was a black hole clocking in at around 10 million times the mass of the Sun. Later, 300 days after the Zwicky detection, the X-ray observatory NuSTAR joined the fun. So when the Zwicky Transient Facility caught the bright flash of a tidal disruption event on 1 March 2021, subsequently named AT2021ehb, NASA turned its NICER X-ray observatory and its Swift Observatory (X-rays, gamma rays, and ultraviolet radiation) to observe the event's evolution in hope of catching something interesting. This process isn't instantaneous, but can take weeks or months and as the black hole devours the stellar debris.Ĭoronae and jets aren't observed for all tidal disruption events, but when they do occur, they are usually seen together. The guts of the dismembered star then stream around the black hole in a chaotic fashion, colliding with itself and generating shocks that glow in multiple wavelengths. Once the star is caught in the black hole's gravitational field, tidal forces stretch and pull it to the point that it comes apart (that's the "disruption" part). Tidal disruption events are fairly rare, but we've seen enough of them to have a fairly detailed understanding of what happens when a star veers just a little too close to a black hole. "They're our window into the real-time feeding of a massive black hole lurking in the center of a galaxy." "Tidal disruption events are a sort of cosmic laboratory," says astronomer Suvi Gezari of the Space Telescope Science Institute. It's the fifth-closest such event – known as a tidal disruption event – ever captured, and the wealth of data obtained could help scientists better understand how black holes 'feed'.
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