Black holes have been spotted spitting up remnants of stars years after gobbling them up and Astronomers don’t know why, a study has found.
Mysterious Black Holes
A study has found that Black holes can burp up remnants of stars years after destroying them, and no one knows why even the Astronomers.
Moreover, a tidal disruption event or (TDE) is a black hole that can spew out a bright flash of energy after tearing apart an unfortunate star and this was long known by the Astronomers.
However, the expectation has been that such jets would be seen just months of the original TDE.
The Insider reported that the newfound study which has not yet been peer-reviewed, found that 10 out of 24 black holes observed started spewing matter between two to six years after the TDE.
Yvette Cendes, a lead author on the research from the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said that this new finding, which has been puzzling astronomers means that they might misunderstood what happens when black holes eat up a star, In his thread on X, formerly Twitter.
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No One Saw The Mysterious Black Holes Coming Because No One Was Looking
There’s a good reason why we’d never seen this before: no one expected it to happen.
A TDE happens when a star gets too near a supermassive black hole. Within a few hours, the star is pulverized to bits.
Astronomers typically think about half of the matter of the star will start swirling around the black hole, creating what is called the “accretion disk.” The theory is then that the other half of the matter will be spewed out in a one-time jet of energy, which can be picked up from Earth.
Astronomers anticipated that a flash of light to happen within a few weeks or months of the TDE. But Astronomers turn their telescopes elsewhere if nothing is detected within that time.
“Radio telescope time is precious! And why look YEARS after the explosive event for something you didn’t see right after said explosive event?” said Cendes on X.
But this view began to change in 2022 when Cendes and her co-workers spotted a black hole that woke up again two years after swallowing a star.
Since then, their collaborators have been monitoring 24 black holes for years on end. They’ve discovered half of them woke up again years after the original star-swallowing event.
One black hole seemed to turn back six years later.
In another two of the cases, Cendes observed the black holes peaking, then fading, and then turning on again.