Astronomers have accurately measured the feeding system of a supermassive black hole nearly a billion years from Earth, giving the team an estimate of when its next meal might be.
The black hole is 50 million times larger than our Sun and sits in the galactic space about 860 million light-years from Earth. In 2018, the system containing the black hole is rapidly brightening; observations followed by several NASA telescopes showed that the black hole had bent the star that had flown very close to its event horizon, a gravitational field that not even light could escape.
This event was highly disturbed, when a passing object was pulled apart by the black hole’s gravity. Disruption wave events shine brightly in the night sky, especially in X-ray and ultraviolet wavelengths, allowing telescopes such as the Chandra X-ray Observatory to detect them.
Two years later, the same system flashed again, indicating that the star had indeed survived the previous event but was instead being slowly torn apart by the consuming black hole. The team’s findings were published last year in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, but new data taken this month by the Chandra X-ray Observatory confirm the black hole’s feeding system.
“The clearest sign of this ending snack would be a sudden drop in X-rays and that’s exactly what we see in our observation of Chandra on August 14, 2023,” said Dheeraj Pasham, an astronomer at MIT and lead author of the paper. research, in a NASA release. “Our data shows that in August last year, the black hole was wiping its mouth and retreating from the table.”
After observing the black hole devouring the star’s material, the team predicted another round of tidal disruption in August 2023. That observation happened. In their 2023 paper, the team predicted a “next rebirth” in March 2025. In today’s release, co-author of the study Eric Coughlin that if the star has not yet disappeared, the third feeding of the black hole will occur between May 2025 and August 2025.
The team plans to keep an eye on the perturbation wave event to better understand how black holes interact with their environment. And of course, may the note on your calendars for the summer of 2025-may be a wise one for those interested in X-rays.
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