The identical star has a supermassive black gap each few years

A black hole nearly 900 million light-years from Earth devours a portion of an orbiting star whenever it gets too close

go through Leah Crane

Nearly 900 million light-years away, a supermassive black hole is feasting.Every 1200 days or so, the same orbiting star gets a little too close and the black hole takes a bite, known as the repeating part tidal disruption event (time delay).

This TDE, designated AT2018fyk, is the second self-repeating TDE discovered. Eric Coughlin Scientists at Syracuse University in New York presented the discovery Jan. 12 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

Astronomers first spotted a black hole 6 billion times the mass of the sun in 2018 brighten suddenly And stay bright for about 600 days. This happens whenever a star gets too close to a black hole, at which point it is shredded by the powerful gravitational field, creating a stream of hot, bright stellar material that then falls into the black hole and dims again. That particular TDE was recorded, and once it faded away quickly, astronomers thought it was over.

But after years of snacking on the black hole, something strange happened. “Nearly four years after it was originally discovered, we went back and observed the object again, and it became bright again,” Coughlin said. “It’s really, really weird, and the standard theory of TDE doesn’t predict that at all.”

The second brightening looks pretty much the same as the first. This led Coughlin and his colleagues to think it was just a second bite of the same star.replace completely smash the starsthe black hole seems to tear away pieces of it each time it gets too close, leaving the star’s core to continue on another orbit.

With each pass, the black hole devours between 1% and 10% of the star. “If it’s 10 percent, it’s more likely that this thing will survive two or three more encounters with the supermassive black hole,” Coughlin said. “If it’s 1 percent…maybe we’re still decades away.”

Right now, AT2018fyk is still bright as the black hole eats its stellar fast food, but if the researchers’ models are correct, it should dim rapidly in August 2023 before brightening again in March 2025. They’ll be watching closely to see what we can learn about how black holes devour matter.

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