See that tiny blob of light, circled in red? Doesn’t look like much, does it? But that blob represents a feast big enough to feed a black hole around 30 million times the mass of our Sun! Scientists call these kinds of stellar meals tidal disruption events, and they’re some of the most dramatic happenings in the cosmos.
Sometimes, an unlucky star strays too close to a black hole. The black hole’s gravity pulls on the star, causing it to stretch in one direction and squeeze in another. Then the star pulls apart into a stream of gas. This is a tidal disruption event. (If you’re worried about this happening to our Sun – don’t. The nearest black hole we know about is over 1,000 light-years away. And black holes aren’t wild space vacuums. They don’t go zipping around sucking up random stars and planets. So we’re pretty safe from tidal disruption events!)
The trailing part of the stream gets flung out of the system. The rest of the gas loops back around the black hole, forming a disk. The material circling in the disk slowly drifts inward toward the black hole’s event horizon, the point at which nothing – not even light – can escape. The black hole consumes the gas and dust in its disk over many years.
Sometimes the black hole only munches on a passing star – we call this a partial tidal disruption event. The star loses some of its gas, but its own gravity pulls it back into shape before it passes the black hole again. Eventually, the black hole will have nibbled away enough material that the star can’t reform and gets destroyed.
We study tidal disruptions, both the full feasts and the partial snacks, using many kinds of telescopes. Usually, these events are spotted by ground-based telescopes like the Zwicky Transient Facility and the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae network.
They alert other ground- and space-based telescopes – like our Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory (illustrated above) and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton – to follow up and collect more data using different wavelengths, from visible light to X-rays. Even our planet-hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite has observed a few of these destructive wonders!
We’re also studying disruptions using multimessenger astronomy, where scientists use the information carried by light, particles, and space-time ripples to learn more about cosmic objects and occurrences.
But tidal disruptions are super rare. They only happen once every 10,000 to 100,000 years in a galaxy the size of our own Milky Way. Astronomers have only observed a few dozen events so far. By comparison, supernovae – the explosive deaths of stars – happen every 100 years or so in a galaxy like ours.
That’s why scientists make their own tidal disruptions using supercomputers, like the ones shown in the video here. Supercomputers allow researchers to build realistic models of stars. They can also include all of the physical effects they’d experience whipping ‘round a black hole, even those from Einstein’s theory of general relativity. They can alter features like how close the stars get and how massive the black holes are to see how it affects what happens to the stars. These simulations will help astronomers build better pictures of the events they observe in the night sky.
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En este campo de estrellas podemos encontrar el bucle de Barnard, M78, la nebulosa de Orión M42, Nebulosa cabeza de caballo y la nebulosa cabeza de la bruja IC2118.
Crédito: Dr. Sebastian Voltmer
https://instagram.com/sebastianvoltmer
~Antares
Vía Láctea en Embalse de Barrios de Luna situado en la comarca leonesa de Luna en España.
📅 19 de Julio del 2020.
Crédito: Marcos Alonso
https://instagram.com/elpiratilla
~Antares
Senda estelar alrededor del polo norte celeste. La estrella en el centro de los arcos celestiales concentricos es Polaris.
Imagen desde Bayanhaote, en el interior de Mongolia de China.
Crédito: Jeff Dai
https://instagram.com/jeffdaiphoto
~Antares
Desde el sur de Francia
Crédito: Ghislain Favé
Instagram.com/ghislain_fave
#UnDiaComoHoy pero en el 2018 fue lanzado la misión #BepiColombo. Es la primera misión europea en conjuncion con la agencia espacial Japonesa (JAXA) hacia el planeta Mercurio. Se espera que llegue a su objetivo en el 2025.
Créditos: @ESA_History
For the first time, astronomers may have detected an exoplanet candidate outside of the Milky Way galaxy. Exoplanets are defined as planets outside of our Solar System. All other known exoplanets and exoplanet candidates have been found in the Milky Way, almost all of them less than about 3,000 light-years from Earth.
This new result is based on transits, events in which the passage of a planet in front of a star blocks some of the star's light and produces a characteristic dip. Researchers used our Chandra X-ray Observatory to search for dips in the brightness of X-rays received from X-ray bright binaries in the spiral galaxy Messier 51, also called the Whirlpool Galaxy (pictured here). These luminous systems typically contain a neutron star or black hole pulling in gas from a closely orbiting companion star. They estimate the exoplanet candidate would be roughly the size of Saturn, and orbit the neutron star or black hole at about twice the distance of Saturn from the Sun.
This composite image of the Whirlpool Galaxy was made with X-ray data from Chandra and optical light from our Hubble Space Telescope.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/R. DiStefano, et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/Grendler
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!
Fotografía de la luna el sábado 9 de Octubre 2021 en su fase creciente al 14,5% de luminosidad, una sola exposición. Sierra de Bolón, Elda.
Crédito: Jordi Coy Astrophoto
https://instagram.com/jordicoy_astrophoto
~Antares
¡Aquí hay una increíble concepción de un artista, que representa la "Sky Crane" de la NASA mientras baja el rover Perseverance de Mars 2020 para un aterrizaje suave en la superficie del planeta rojo!
Crédito de representación: MAAS digital LLC, National Geographic Channel
Visto desde la luna de hielo Tetis , los anillos y las sombras mostrarían fantásticas vistas del sistema de Saturno. ¿No has visitado a Tethys últimamente? Entonces este hermoso paisaje en anillo de la nave espacial Cassini tendrá que funcionar por ahora. Atrapada por la luz del sol justo debajo y a la izquierda del centro de la imagen en 2005, la propia Tetis tiene unos 1.000 kilómetros de diámetro y orbita a menos de cinco radios de Saturno desde el centro del planeta gigante gaseoso.
#Glaretum #astrophotography #espacio #Saturno
Créditos: Equipo de imágenes Cassini, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA.
Vía Láctea sobre Estación Wadley, San Luis Potosí. En la imagen podemos ver una casa de adobe.
Crédito: Pavel Vorobiev
https://instagram.com/_vorobservatorio_
~Antares
Glaretum fundado en el 2015 con el objetivo de divulgar la ciencia a través de la Astronomía hasta convertirnos en una fuente de conocimiento científico veraz siendo garantía de información seria y actualizada.
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