Supermassive black holes are voracious beasts
A black hole burped up a star it ate three years ago, the discovery has left astronomers puzzled. In October 2018, scientists caught a black hole swallowing a small star which was 665 million away from Earth.
"This caught us completely by surprise - no one has ever seen anything like this before," said Yvette Cendes, a research associate at the Harvard and Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics said in a press statement. Cendes is a lead author of a research article published in The Astrophysical Journal.
The study found that the black hole is ejecting material travelling at half of the speed of light, but are unsure why the outflow was delayed by several years.
Cendes said, "It's as if this black hole has started abruptly burping out a bunch of material from the star it ate years ago."
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Supermassive black holes are voracious beasts. Their tremendous gravitational pull sucks in everything that gets too close, including stars.
According to NASA, most black holes form from the remnants of a large star that dies in a supernova explosion. (Smaller stars become dense neutron stars, which are not massive enough to trap light.)
Astronomers have caught black holes in the act of murdering stars before. But this was different. They had never seen a black hole belching up a star it gobbled many years ago.
It was an accidental discovery by scientists. The team spotted the unusual outburst while revisiting tidal disruption events (TDEs) - when encroaching stars are spaghettified by black holes - that occurred over the last several years.
Radio data from the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico showed that the black hole had mysteriously reanimated in June 2021. The team rushed to examine the event more closely, the study said.