Yikes! What a way to go. One wonders if there were any planets around that star and if they may have contained life. We’ll never know.
Black hole eats star, producing bright gamma-ray flash
By Robert Sanders, Media Relations UC Berkeley | June 16, 2011
BERKELEY —
A bright flash of gamma rays observed March 28 by the Swift satellite may have been the death rattle of a star falling into a massive black hole and being ripped apart, according to a team of astronomers led by the University of California, Berkeley.
When the Swift Gamma Burst Mission spacecraft first detected the flash within the constellation Draco, astronomers thought it was a gamma-ray burst from a collapsing star and designated it GRB 110328A. On March 31, however, UC Berkeley’s Joshua Bloom sent out an email circular suggesting that it wasn’t a typical gamma-ray burst at all, but a high-energy jet produced as a star about the size of our sun was shredded by a black hole a million times more massive.
Careful analysis of the Swift data and subsequent observations by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory confirmed Bloom’s initial insight. The details are published online today (Thursday, June 16) in Science Express, a rapid publication arm of the journal Science.
“This is truly different from any explosive event we have seen before,” Bloom said.
What made this gamma-ray flare, called Sw 1644+57, stand out from a typical burst were its long duration and the fact that it appeared to come from the center of a galaxy nearly 4 billion light years away. Since most, if not all, galaxies are thought to contain a massive black hole at the center, a long-duration burst could conceivably come from the relatively slow tidal disruption of an infalling star, the astronomers said.
“This burst produced a tremendous amount of energy over a fairly long period of time, and the event is still going on more than two and a half months later,” said Bloom, an associate professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley. “That’s because as the black hole rips the star apart, the mass swirls around like water going down a drain, and this swirling process releases a lot of energy.”
Bloom and his colleagues propose in their Science Express paper that some 10 percent of the infalling star’s mass is turned into energy and irradiated as X-rays from the swirling accretion disk or as X-rays and higher energy gamma rays from a relativistic jet that punches out along the rotation axis. Earth just happened to be in the eye of the gamma-ray beam.
Bloom draws an analogy with a quasar, which is a distant galaxy that emits bright, high-energy light because of the massive black hole at its center gobbling up stars and sending out a jet of X-rays along its rotation axis. Observed from an angle, these bright emissions are called active galactic nuclei, but when observed down the axis of the jet, they’re referred to as blazars.
“We argue that this must be jetted material and we’re looking down the barrel,” he said. “Jetting is a common phenomenon when you have accretion disks, and black holes actually prefer to make jets.”
Looking back at previous observations of this region of the cosmos, Bloom and his team could find no evidence of X-ray or gamma-ray emissions, leading them to conclude that this is a “one-off event,” Bloom said.
“Here, you have a black hole sitting quiescently, not gobbling up matter, and all of a sudden something sets it off,” Bloom said. “This could happen in our own galaxy, where a black hole sits at the center living in quiescence, and occasionally burbles or hiccups as it swallows a little bit of gas. From a distance, it would appear dormant, until a star randomly wanders too close and is shredded.”
Probable tidal disruptions of a star by a massive black hole have previously been seen at X-ray, ultraviolet and optical wavelengths, but never before at gamma-ray energies. Such random events, especially looking down the barrel of a jet, are incredibly rare, “probably once in 100 million years in any given galaxy,” said Bloom. “I would be surprised if we saw another one of these anywhere in the sky in the next decade.”
The astronomers suspect that the gamma-ray emissions began March 24 or 25 in the uncatalogued galaxy at a redshift of 0.3534, putting it at a distance of about 3.8 billion light years. Bloom and his colleagues estimate that the emissions will fade over the next year.
“We think this event was detected around the time it was as bright as it will ever be, and if it’s really a star being ripped apart by a massive black hole, we predict that it will never happen again in this galaxy,” he said.
Bloom’s colleagues include UC Berkeley theoretical physicist Elliot Quataert, who models the production of jets from accretion disks, and UC Berkeley astronomers S. Bradley Cenko, Daniel A. Perley, Nathaniel R. Butler, Linda E. Strubbe, Antonino Cucchiara, Geoffrey C. Bower and Adam N. Morgan; Dimitrios Giannios and Brian D. Metzger of Princeton University; Andrew J. Levan of the University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom; Nial R. Tanvir, Paul T. O’ Brien, Andrew R. King and Sergei Nayakshin of the University of Leicester in the U.K.; Fabio De Colle, Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz and James Guillochon of UC Santa Cruz; William H. Lee of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México in Mexico City; Andrew S. Fruchter of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md.; and Alexander J. van der Horst of the Universities Space Research Association in Huntsville, Ala.
Levan is first author of the companion Science Express paper, and leader of the Chandra and Hubble Space Telescope observation team.
Bloom and his laboratory are supported by grants from NASA and the National Science Foundation.
ClimateForAll: I suspect that tallbloke is referring to something similar my reaction –> these astronomers and astro-physicists always speak as if these objects — quasars, black holes, etc — were actual real things that we have ‘personal’ knowledge of. They are, of course,more correctly theoretical explanations for phenomena that we can sense from Earth, either directly with optical telescopes, or now more often, with our vast array of earth and space based sensors. When astronomers see phenomena X together with Y, they develop a theory as to what in heaven (pardon please) it might be. When enough of them agree that the theory sounds right, is really cool, pleases their egos, or whatever, they then decide they have proven it to be so, and give it a name. Sometimes they even predict other phenomena that would support their theory and look for and sometimes find it, adding some substance to the otherwise merely hypothesized object.
In the 1700’s European scientists would sit around in their royal societies and discuss sea monsters, cyclopes, and give learned explanations for beasts that we now know are mythical or give lectures denying the existence of things we now know to be real. I’m not all that sure that astro-physicists haven’t fallen into the same intellectual trap.
Interesting … I hve always this question: How can a bllack hole increace in mass? Yes, objectively it will increase in internal mass when more matter falls into it, but how does that internal mass increase get conveyed outward across the event horizon. Supposedly, nothing can
“One wonders if there were any planets around that star and if they may have contained life.”
Where is that dam’d TARDIS when you want one?
If a black hole sucks in planets and other matter, does it ever get to the point where it is full and vomits them all out again in a big bang?
I imagine a black hole as being an astronomical quantumn mechanical blob, like a neutron, let’s say. All the mass of the black hole is, effectively, at zero energy, which means that its de Broglie wave length is huge. Surely, when the mass of the black hole is large enough that its de Broglie wavelength exceeds the diameter of the black hole (event horizon), then it becomes unstable with a finite probability of unbecoming a black hole; think radioactivity as a qualitative comparison.
Think GigaBoom!
Personally, I wish the term “black hole” had never been coined. It is deceiving at best.
PHager says:
June 17, 2011 at 2:58 pm
LIGO wasn’t a waste of money. …it most likely proved that the detector design didn’t work or Einstein was wrong. Pick one or all of the above.
LOL
Awesome. I’ll be teaching this topic again middle of September, so I really love news like this.
Oh, and Go Bears! 🙂
As the old saying goes…
“When you find yourself in a black hole, stop digging.”
So clearly ‘black holes’ ain’t as black or as ‘holey’ as we’ve been led to believe.
We thought that nothing could escape their gravitational pull…not even light…that’s why they’re black you see.
Hang about, this one, as it engulfed a star gave off a ‘flash’ gamma rays…how did that happen?
Can we now accurately describe Black Holes as Gamma Ray emitters?
Answer…we really have no idea, but we pay people to be creative and speculate on our behalf…sound familiar?
So the lesson for us non-technical types here is “Don’t get to close to black holes”?
Nitpick alert.
More accurate reporting would involve inserting a few words …
This thing actually occurred a billion years or so after the Earth was formed according to our current understanding of vast distances.
“One wonders if there were any planets around that star and if they may have contained life.”
I’m guessing that gravitational disruption by, and X-ray emissions from, the black hole, trashed any planets around that star a long time before the star actually fell into the black hole.
Unless the star was on a direct collision course with the black hole, it would have been orbiting it for a long, long time.
“So clearly ‘black holes’ ain’t as black or as ‘holey’ as we’ve been led to believe.”
Black holes do evaporate, given enough time. But even before that, matter falling into the hole becomes superheated and gives off X-rays (and apparently Gamma rays) before it reaches the event horizon.
charles n.;
I’m no Black-Holista, but your comments are nonsense. It’s an accretion ring swirling around the outside of the BH that perportedly throws off energy and radiation, etc.
The gravitation in a black hole is beyond imagination. I read somewhere that, as an object falls into one, the differential gravity between molecules is so great they will be torn apart. So, rather than being stretched, a body would be disintegrated into it’s molecular components. Now that’s some gravity.
Someone asked, how can you see one to know it’s there? Although black holes can’t be seen directly, their presence can be detected by the lens effect of their gravitational field as it bends light around it.
Can someone explain how a black hole is destroyed? I understand they will eventually explode, but how is the energy released from the gravitational pull?
Luther Bl. says:
June 17, 2011 at 12:51 pm
Oh dear. So “may” is unacceptable in news stories about climate, but ok in news stories about space. Are the Electric Universe people even more feared here than the warmenistas?
______________________
Ming!
Is that you?
More of that Pierre RayHumbert type of imagination. If you can’t think of anything else that could have caused it, why, it MUST be what you guessed it was based on your models which are based on previous giants in physics math, though somewhat tortured it may be.
Charlie Foxtrot,
you know of nothing else in the whole universe that can bend light? Just a theoretical black hole?? (snicker)
There’s no reason to start picking on every science report that contains the words “may”, “might”, “could be” and similars. That’s how science works. Those guys reported an unusual observation and proposed an explanation for it. If a better explanation comes later, even better. Granted, the guy’s “predictions” are a pure guessing game (or maybe he has some computer models for it…?), but that’s not their results.
But anyway, it would be a magnificent sight, watching a entire star being torn apart by a black hole.
Deathstar planet killer.There is life out there and it is as we know it.
PaulH says:
June 17, 2011 at 10:17 am
Can we add voracious black holes to the list of catastrophes caused by global warming? ;->
We could I suppose – only this event happened some 4 billion years ago. *left wondering what the current state of affairs is in real time. Guess we’ll know in another 4 billion years
But in the midst of all this erudite – well most of it – discussion, noone has answered the most obvious question. If a large star falls into a black hole, where does it go?
“I love the term “flash”. I guess in astronomical scales, it was a flash (but then what is a normal burst like?). A fascinating finding, and due to its relative longevity, was a good one to study.”
Gamma ray bursts were discovered when both sides in the cold war set up a system for detecting nuclear tests.
It was found that events which were of extra-galactic origin occured at the rate of a few per month.
The energy involved in any such event is truely astronomical.
I quote from memory the essence of an article that I read in the French revue journal “La Recherche” “Whereas a star like our sun will shine for about 10 billion years and will in that time convert about five percent of its original mass into energy, the collapse of a star responsible for a gamma ray burst will have converted about forty percent of its mass into energy in about ten minutes!”.
I have to say that whereas the mechanism which involved actual, as apposed to the normal virtual, polarisation of the vacuum was invoked, I could not see how the forty percent of matter anhiilation was achieved. But if we ever find ourselves in the direct line of fire of one of these events the earth will roast like a chicken on a spit!
Luther Bl. says:
June 17, 2011 at 12:51 pm
“Oh dear. So “may” is unacceptable in news stories about climate, but ok in news stories about space. Are the Electric Universe people even more feared here than the warmenistas?”
The HUGE difference is that no one researching space issues is trying to bankrupt the world mitigating things that “may” happen.
Kelvin Vaughan says:
June 17, 2011 at 12:15 pm
“The bad news is that the red shift was caused by the black hole and it’s only a stones throw away.”
So wouldn’t a gamma ray burst pointed at us only “a stone’s throw away” affect us in a bad way?