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What is Black Hole || What is A Mysterious the Black Hole

 

What is Black Hole || What is  A Mysterious the black hole 

Black holes are one of the most powerful. They have a significant impact on how galaxies and stars form What is  A Mysterious the black hole. What is Black Hole

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A Mysterious Blast Of Light Is A Black Hole Pointing Straight At Earth, Scientists Say

A Mysterious Blast Of Light Is A Black Hole Pointing Straight At Earth, Scientists Say


A mysterious and incredibly intense blast of visible light that came towards Earth came from a black hole that is pointing straight at us, astronomers have said.

The discovery marks the furthest such event that scientists have ever said, as well as being the first time that astronomers have detected one using visible light. The latter was only possible because the jet is pointing almost directly at Earth.

When stars get too close to a black hole, they are torn to shreds and the blast can be detected throughout the universe. The event is known as a tidal disruption event, or TDE, and in abou 1 per cent of cases they send plasma and radiation out of each side of the black hole.

Those rare events are known as jetted-TDEs, and have been likened to grabbing a toothpaste tube and having material spurt out of either end. Scientists hardly ever see them, and understand even less about how they actually happen.

As part of the effort to better understand them, scientists watch the sky for signs of the events in the hope that they can turn advanced telescopes towards them when they happen. In February, that happened: astronomers saw an intriguing blast of visible light that led scientists to turn some of the world’s most advanced telescopes towards its source.

The light appeared to give off more light than 1,000 trillion suns, and cam out of a part of the sky where no such light had been observed before. That prompted excitement among the scientists who were watching.

Now scientists believe that it comes out of one of those jetted-TDEs, named AT 2022cmc. The jet probably formed when a black hole suddenly started eating a nearby star, shooting energy through the universe – and right at us.

They found that it was coming from incredibly far away, and further away than any other similar event. The light that had reached Earth started on its journey across space when the universe was about a third of the age it is now.

But it was so unusually bright and visible because the jet is pointing right at us, meaning that it is both more intense than usual and can be seen over a broader part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

It led astronomers to discover the TDE, which has already broken a whole host of records. Scientists hope that it can be used to find even more, allowing them to be better understood and give further detail about black holes.

The findings are reported in two new papers. One, ‘A very luminous jet from the disruption of a star by a massive black hole’, is published in Nature; the other, ‘The Birth of a Relativistic Jet Following the Disruption of a Star by a Cosmological Black Hole’, is published in Nature Astronomy.


A Space Flash Detected In February Was A Black Hole Devouring An Unassuming Star

On February 11, a star approached a supermassive black hole and subsequently was shredded by the intense gravitational forces. From Earth, scientists observed the event as a distant flash of light.

Now, researchers have determined that the bright flash was the result of a tidal disruption event, a release of electromagnetic energy that occurs when a star wanders too close to a supermassive black hole and meets its fatal end, according to NASA.

At 8.5 billion light-years away from Earth, this was the farthest and brightest tidal disruption event ever discovered, according to a statement. Two studies published Wednesday in the journals Nature and Nature Astronomy detailed the rare cosmic event from earlier this year.

“When a star dangerously approaches a black hole—no worries, this will not happen to the sun—it is violently ripped apart by the black hole’s gravitational tidal forces—similar to how the moon pulls tides on Earth but with greater strength,” Michael Coughlin, co-author of the Nature study and astronomer at the University of Minnesota, tells Reuters’ Will Dunham.

During a tidal disruption event, the black hole tears the star into thin streams of matter in a process called “spaghettification.” As this happens, some of the star’s material enters the black hole, which releases of a jet of energy that’s so bright that it can be detected by astronomers, according to a 2020 release about a similar cosmic event.

The flash, named AT 2022cmc, appeared particularly bright. It was first detected by a telescope at the California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility astronomical survey. Then, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile examined the event’s distance from Earth.

Researchers found that the black hole’s jet was pointed directly at our planet. This created a “Doppler-boosting” effect that made it appear brighter than if the jet were pointed elsewhere. AT 2022cmc is one of four detected instances of a star being swallowed by a black hole and the first tidal disruption event identified since 2011, according to the statement.

“The luminous jet of material was launched almost at the speed of light, and the jet was pointing in our direction,” Igor Andreoni, an astronomer at the University of Maryland and a co-author of the Nature paper, tells The Daily Beast’s Tony Ho Tran. “This is an extremely rare phenomenon, and it is even rarer that it can be observed at all, because the jet is collimated, which means that we can observe it only if we are very close to the direction in which it is pointing.”

Bright flashes observed in the sky are usually gamma-ray bursts, or quick blasts of high-energy gamma-ray light released when massive stars collapse, according to NASA. However, the researchers knew the February flare was too bright to have been a gamma-ray burst.

“As bright as [gamma-ray bursts] are, there is only so much light a collapsing star can produce,” Benjamin Gompertz, an astronomer at the University of Birmingham who led the gamma-ray burst comparison analysis, says in the statement. “Because AT 2022cmc was so bright and lasted so long, we knew that something truly gargantuan must be powering it—a supermassive black hole.”

Around the world, a total of 21 telescopes tuned to various wavelengths—including X-ray, radio and optical—observed the beam of light, reports Gizmodo’s Isaac Schultz. AT 2022cmc was the first Doppler-boosted tidal disruption event to be discovered using optical light.

With tidal disruption events being so rare, the researchers’ findings could provide new insight into the formation and development of supermassive black holes.

“Astronomy is changing rapidly,” Andreoni says in a statement. “Scientists can use AT 2022cmc as a model for what to look for and find more disruptive events from distant black holes.”

Black Holes New Research Outer Space telescope universe

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A Black Hole Ripped Apart A Star And Brought Together Astronomers From Around The World

                             A Black Hole Ripped Apart A Star And Brought Together Astronomers From Around The World 

It was an event not seen in more than a decade: a sudden flash of energy launched out from the center of a distant galaxy, bright enough to be visible from 8.5 billion light-years away. With a burst of light equivalent to more than 1,000 trillion suns, the flash was first detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility, a survey of the entire night sky conducted from the Palomar Observatory in California.

“On Valentine’s Day this year, we found a source that was puzzling. It was just weird!” Igor Andreoni of the University of Maryland, lead author of one of two papers about the event, told The Verge. “And weird is good in science. It means it’s something you can learn from.”

Within days, astronomers around the world turned their telescopes toward the flash, observing it in X-ray, radio, and other wavelengths. It was extraordinarily bright and was similar to a gamma-ray burst — a type of bright flash usually detected by gamma ray or X-ray telescopes. But this one had been spotted by an optical telescope.

The tremendous brightness of the flash led astronomers to conclude that it must have been caused by a star being torn apart. A star had wandered too close to the supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy and been shredded by the gravitational forces. “It can completely rip apart the star. It’s literally pulled and stretched until it can’t stand together anymore,” Andreoni explained. This is called a tidal disruption event, and astronomers have spotted dozens of these events over recent years.

“Weird is good in science. It means it’s something you can learn from”

What is unusual about this particular event is that it created a tremendous jet of energy, with material being thrown out from the black hole’s poles at close to the speed of light. “We don’t know why, but sometimes a very powerful jet of material is launched when the star is disrupted,” Andreoni said. This jet is thought to have been especially bright because it is pointed directly at Earth, making it both appear brighter and be visible across a broader part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

To spot dramatic transient events like these, astronomers need telescopes that continually scan as much of the sky as possible and which flag any sudden changes in brightness — like the Zwicky Transient Facility. But there are thousands of changes in brightness observed every night, so this mountain of data needs to be refined to unearth the most interesting objects. Andreoni’s group works on sifting through this data to find very fast events in the optical wavelength.

Sudden changes in brightness could potentially be caused by a supernova or by two neutron stars merging. Further observations are needed to understand the specific event that triggered the flash. A supernova, for example, brightens over a period of weeks, which is extremely fast by astronomical standards. But this particular event brightened even faster than that, within a few hours or days. That made it of immediate and pressing interest.

The group flagged this flash to the international community, encouraging researchers who worked using telescopes operating in other wavelengths like radio or X-ray to observe it, too. In total, 21 telescopes contributed data on the event. “When all the pieces of the puzzle were acquired and put together, this picture emerged which was just astonishing,” Andreoni said. “We were not expecting to find such a rare source, and definitely not in the optical.”

Of the stars that are ripped apart by black holes, only around 1 percent seem to produce these powerful jets, but researchers still aren’t sure exactly why. As the star is pulled apart and its material is pulled in toward the black hole, the energy of this matter is converted into light. It’s theorized that the magnetic fields and spin of the black hole could act together to send material shooting out from its poles — like a tube of paint squeezed in the middle until material flies out of either end.

“We’re talking about thousands of times the mass of the Earth that is pulled apart and spun up and launched at close to the speed of light. It’s a really unique opportunity to study something that is impossible to reproduce on Earth,” Andreoni said.

This was the first time that such a jet had been detected in the visible light part of the electromagnetic spectrum, also known as the optical wavelength. Previously, jets from around black holes had been detected by looking at X-rays, gamma rays, and radio waves.

This both tells astronomers something about the environment around the black hole — that it is not that dense because it allowed optical light to pass through — and shows that looking in the optical range could be a useful way to spot these extreme events in the future.

“We’re talking about thousands of times the mass of the Earth that is pulled apart and spun up and launched at close to the speed of light.”

The need for telescopes to respond quickly to such events is also creating an impetus for greater flexibility in telescope design and planning. Telescopes like Hubble or James Webb are vastly oversubscribed, meaning many more researchers apply for time on the telescope than it is possible to accommodate. That’s why observing time is meticulously planned out years in advance and every last minute of observation time is filled as much as possible. But there’s also a need for telescopes that can respond to rare events within hours or even minutes.

It’s hard to safely and quickly change the direction of a space-based telescope, so Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope only occasionally contribute to this kind of research. But recently built ground-based telescopes, like the MASTER network or the GROWTH-India telescope, specialize in scanning the sky for gamma-ray events and immediately and autonomously moving to observe them.

And there’s always the option of a human-based intervention. “Sometimes you literally have to call people up and say, ‘Hey, can you please point the telescope at these or those coordinates?’” Andreoni said. In other cases, researchers submit requests through online systems to make observations during available moments. There’s increasing interest in  considering how telescopes can respond to these brief and rare but scientifically important events.

Both the international cooperation between researchers working with different telescopes and the ability of those telescopes to respond rapidly were essential for making this breakthrough in black hole observations, Andreoni said. “This was extremely important for this kind of discovery. If we couldn’t do it with any telescope, we would have not realized that we were sitting on such a big discovery.”

considering how telescopes can respond to these brief and rare but scientifically important events.

Both the international cooperation between researchers working with different telescopes and the ability of those telescopes to respond rapidly were essential for making this breakthrough in black hole observations, Andreoni said. “This was extremely important for this kind of discovery. If we couldn’t do it with any telescope, we would have not realized that we were sitting on such a big discovery.”

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