If a star gets too close to a massive black hole, things look bad for it. Due to the strong influence of tidal forces, the star can literally be torn apart within a few hours: about half of the celestial body flies away, while the rest forms an “accretion disk” around the black hole. This disk surrounds the black hole and constantly feeds it with falling matter. The event appears to astronomers on Earth as a bright optical flash. Then the experts receive more signals. For the first few days or weeks, the accretion disk is not particularly stable, as the material in it keeps colliding, creating measurable radio signals.
These star-destroying events (tidal disturbance events, or TDEs for short) are not rare. This allowed astronomers led by Yvette Sindis of Harvard University to examine 23 such events several years after they occurred. And they made an amazing discovery, They will present their work report in August 2023, which has not yet been reviewed: Nine of the observed TDEs only delivered the expected radio signal two to six years before the star was destroyed. “No one suspected or expected this – a discovery that turns the entire field upside down!” Cendes writes in a Reddit post:. And it gets even crazier: Two of the observed TDEs produced the expected radio signal shortly after the event, which then faded away before clearly reappearing months later.
What causes this “burping” Cendes also calls out late radio signals on the news site LivescienceNot yet known. Sindis emphasizes on Reddit that it does not matter who escapes from the black hole. Galaxy monsters contain a very large amount of matter in a small space, making the gravitational force so strong that after a certain distance nothing can escape from the black hole. This limit, beyond which escape becomes impossible even for light, is called the event horizon. What happens next remains hidden because no signals can reach the outside world. Thus the ejection of matter would be a sensation for which there is no evidence.
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