‘The star appears to be living to die another day’

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‘The star appears to be living to **** another day’

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Astronomers have pinned down a faraway ****** *****’s snack schedule after watching it devour a star across years. | Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

Astronomers have succeeded in forecasting the meal timings of a colossal ****** ***** after watching it devour a nearby star in bits and pieces, they announced earlier this week, marking a step forward in understanding the

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of these cosmic voids.

The data behind the forecasts was beamed home in 2018, when an automated ground-based survey flagged a surge in brightness from a galaxy roughly 860 million

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from Earth. The flare-up — which can be likened to turning on a cosmic light switch billions of times brighter than our sun — pointed to a star being shredded and consumed by a supermassive ****** *****, which lurks in the center of a faraway galaxy and weighs roughly 50 million times our

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The star’s decimated material heated up as it approached the ****** *****, blasting X-ray and ultraviolet emissions strong enough to be picked up by space telescopes. Those signals faded a little over a year later, hinting that the ****** ***** had fully ingested the star. However, the signals appeared to surge once again two years later, showing that the star’s core had actually survived the first pass while its outer envelopes were destroyed.

Based on telescope data about the star and its orbit, astronomers used a model to forecast the ****** *****’s second-to-last meal before August 2023. The results were  confirmed with follow-up observations taken with the Chandra X-ray telescope, which recorded the predicted drop in bright emissions beaming from the system.

Related: James Webb Space Telescope finds a shock near supermassive ****** ***** (image)

“Initially we thought this was a garden-variety case of a ****** ***** totally ripping a star apart,” Thomas Wevers of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who led the

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, said in a

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. “Instead, the star appears to be living to **** another day.”

“The ****** ***** was essentially wiping its mouth and pushing back from the table,” Dheeraj Pasham, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who led the latest study, added in the same statement.

The ill-fated star also had a companion star, which was tossed into space at speeds comparable to 1,000 kilometers per second (621 miles per second), study co-author Muryel Guolo of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore explained in the statement. “The doomed star was forced to make a drastic change in companions — from another star to a giant ****** *****,” Guolo said. “Its stellar partner escaped, but it did not.”

The star left bound to the ****** ***** ended up being devoured in small portions at a time, which is unlike the conventional “once-and-done” meal of a

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It thus offers a new way to probe the physics of ****** ***** behavior, the researchers believe.

“We anticipate that this model will be an essential tool for scientists in identifying these discoveries,” study co-author Eric Coughlin, a professor of physics at Syracuse University in New York, said in a university

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Related Stories:

— Weird physics at the edges of ****** holes may help resolve lingering ‘Hubble trouble’

— Hubble Space Telescope finds closest massive ****** ***** to Earth — a cosmic clue frozen in time

— The Chandra X-ray spacecraft may soon go dark, threatening a great deal of astronomy

From recent data collected by Chandra and Swift, the researchers predict the shredded star makes its closest approach to the ****** ***** once every 3.5 years. Its orbit indicates the ****** *****’s third meal — that is, if there’s anything left of the star — would kick off between May and August next year. If that feast does occur, it will last for almost two years, Coughlin said.

“This will probably be more of a snack than a full meal because the second meal was smaller than the first, and the star is being whittled away.”

A

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about these results was published on Wednesday (Aug. 14) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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