Tidal Disruption: Supermassive Dormant Black Hole Eats Star, Warps Space and Time

Researchers have detected a dormant supermassive black hole that has awoken to devour a star in a process called tidal disruption.

The study from the University of Maryland and the University of Michigan published in Nature detected the said activity by documenting the X-rays bouncing within the walls of the black hole after eating the star. The researchers said that the star came too close to the supermassive black hole named Swift J1644+57, which resulted to the space giant shredding and swallowing it.

The Verge notes that black holes are highly dense extraterrestrial objects that are hard to study because nothing, not even light, could escape it. However, from time to time, tidal disruptions occur, enabling scientists to further study the massive black holes via X-ray emissions.

Erin Kara, lead author on the study, told Phys.org, "Most tidal disruption events don't emit much in the high-energy X-ray band. But there have been at least three known events that have, and this is the first and only such event that has been caught at its peak."

According to Kara, the supermassive black hole was first detected by NASA's Swift satellite, which triggered the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency and NASA's Suzaku satellite. This confluence of information from three powerful satellites makes it the first highly detailed observation of a tidal disruption.

The study further says that the accretion disk, a cloud composed of the star's remnants after the tidal disruption, acts like a reflective disk where X-ray emissions are amplified. This recent discovery changes scientists' previous assumption that after a tidal disruption, X-ray emissions are created further through huge energy beams ejected away from the black hole.

"This is helping us understand how material can fall so rapidly into a supermassive black hole," Kara explained. "This is something that is important not just for understanding tidal disruption events, but for understanding how black holes gain mass in general, how they feed in general."