supermassive black hole tagged posts

In this artist’s rendering, a thick accretion disk has formed around a supermassive black hole following the tidal disruption of a star that wandered too close. Stellar debris has fallen toward the black hole and collected into a thick chaotic disk of hot gas. Flashes of X-ray light near the center of the disk result in light echoes that allow astronomers to map the structure of the funnel-like flow, revealing for the first time strong gravity effects around a normally quiescent black hole. Credit: NASA/Swift/Aurore Simonnet, Sonoma State University

Data suggest black holes swallow stellar debris in bursts...

Galaxy cluster. Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO, TIFR/NCRA/GMRT, NAOJ/Subaru: R. van Weeren et al

An international team of astronomers, including Lancaster’s David Sobral, has discovered a cosmic one-two punch never seen before. 2 of the most powerful phenomena in the Universe – a supermassive black hole and the collision of giant galaxy clusters – have combined to create a stupendous cosmic particle accelerator. By combining data from some of the best X-ray, optical and radio telescopes in the world, researchers have found out what happens when matter ejected by a giant black hole is swept up in the merger of two enormous galaxy clusters.

This cosmic double whammy is found in a pair of colliding galaxy clusters called Abell 3411 and Abell 3412 located about 2 billion light years from Earth...

In just the right conditions, the destruction of a star in a black hole’s gravitational tide should produce an unusual flash of light. Credit: Chandra/Harvard

When astronomers and astrophysicists observe flashes of light in the dark sky, they assume they have seen a supernova. Possibly a star has burnt up its supply of nuclear fuel and collapsed, throwing off its outer layers into space; or maybe a dense white dwarf siphoned off material from a companion star until it exploded from excess weight. But a flash of light observed on June 14, 2015 did not fit any of the usual models.

For one thing, the intensity of the light was double that of the brightest supernova recorded up to that point. So astrophysicists were already asking what process could have caused it...

An artist’s depiction of a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole surrounded the rotating leftovers of a star that was ripped apart by the tidal forces of the black hole. Credit: ESO, ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser

Astronomers illuminate the role rapidly spinning black holes play in tidal disruption events. Back in 2015 when astronomers discovered an intense flare in a distant galaxy, they considered it the brightest supernova ever observed. Now, UC Santa Barbara astrophysicists and a group of international colleagues offer an entirely different interpretation based on new astronomical observation data from the Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO), a global robotic telescope network, and the Hubble Space Telescope.

The new information indicates that the event, called ASASSN-15lh, is actually a tidal...