[NASA] 3 Black Holes Caught Eating Massive Stars in NASA Data

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3 ****** Holes Caught Eating Massive Stars in NASA Data

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A disk of hot gas swirls around a ****** hole in this illustration. Some of the gas came from a star that was pulled apart by the ****** hole, forming the long stream of hot gas on the right, feeding into the disk.

Credits:
NASA/JPL-Caltech

****** holes are invisible to us unless they interact with something else. Some continuously eat gas and dust, and appear to glow brightly over time as matter falls in. But other ****** holes secretly lie in wait for years until a star comes close enough to snack on.

Scientists have recently identified three supermassive ****** holes at the centers of distant galaxies, each of which suddenly brightened when it destroyed a star and then stayed bright for several months. A new study using space and ground-based data from NASA, ESA (European Space Agency), and other institutions presents these rare occurrences as a new category of cosmic events called “extreme nuclear transients.”

Looking for more of these extreme nuclear transients could help unveil some of the most massive supermassive ****** holes in the universe that are usually quiet.

“These events are the only way we can have a spotlight that we can shine on otherwise inactive massive ****** holes,” said Jason Hinkle, graduate student at the University of Hawaii and lead author of

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describing this phenomenon.

The ****** holes in question seem to have eaten stars three to 10 times heavier than our Sun. Feasting on the stars resulted in some of the most energetic transient events ever recorded.

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This illustration shows a glowing stream of material from a star as it is being devoured by a supermassive ****** hole. When a star passes within a certain distance of a ****** hole — close enough to be gravitationally disrupted — the stellar material gets stretched and compressed as it falls into the ****** hole.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

These events as unleash enormous amount of high-energy radiation on the central regions of their host galaxies. “That has implications for the environments in which these events are occurring,” Hinkle said. “If galaxies have these events, they’re important for the galaxies themselves.”

The stars’ destruction produces high-energy light that takes over 100 days to reach peak brightness, then more than 150 days to dim to half of its peak. The way the high-energy radiation affects the environment results in lower-energy emissions that telescopes can also detect.

One of these star-destroying events, nicknamed “Barbie” because of its catalog identifier ZTF20abrbeie, was discovered in 2020 by the Zwicky Transient Facility at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in California, and documented in two 2023 studies. The other two ****** holes were detected by ESA’s Gaia mission in 2016 and 2018 and are studied in detail in the new paper.

NASA’s

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was critical in confirming that these events must have been related to ****** holes, not stellar explosions or other phenomena.  The way that the X-ray, ultraviolet, and optical light brightened and dimmed over time was like a fingerprint matching that of a ****** hole ripping a star apart.

Scientists also used data from NASA’s

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spacecraft, which was operated from 2009 to 2011 and then was reactivated as NEOWISE and

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in 2024. Under the WISE mission the spacecraft mapped the sky at infrared wavelengths, finding many new distant objects and cosmic phenomena. In the new study, the spacecraft’s data helped researchers characterize dust in the environments of each ****** hole. Numerous ground-based observatories additionally contributed to this discovery, including the W. M. Keck Observatory telescopes through their NASA-funded archive and the NASA-supported Near-Earth Object surveys ATLAS, Pan-STARRS, and Catalina.

“What I think is so exciting about this work is that we’re pushing the upper bounds of what we understand to be the most energetic environments of the universe,” said Anna Payne, a staff scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute and study co-author, who helped look for the chemical fingerprints of these events with the University of Hawaii 2.2-meter Telescope.

A Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) grant from the agency helped enable Hinkle to search for these ****** hole events. “The FINESST grant gave Jason the freedom to track down and figure out what these events actually were,” said Ben Shappee, associate professor at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, a study coauthor and advisor to Hinkle.

Hinkle is set to follow up on these results as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign through the

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. “One of the biggest questions in astronomy is how ****** holes grow throughout the universe,” Hinkle said.

The results complement recent observations from

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showing how supermassive ****** holes feed and grow in the early universe. But since only 10% of early ****** holes are actively eating gas and dust, extreme nuclear transients — that is, catching a supermassive ****** hole in the act of eating a massive star — are a different way to find ****** holes in the early universe.

Events like these are so bright that they may be visible even in the distant, early universe. Swift showed that extreme nuclear transients emit most of their light in the ultraviolet. But as the universe expands, that light is stretched to longer wavelengths and shifts into the infrared — exactly the kind of light NASA’s upcoming

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was designed to detect.

With its powerful infrared sensitivity and wide field of view, Roman will be able to spot these rare explosions from more than 12 billion years ago, when the universe was just a tenth of its current age. Scheduled to launch by 2027, and potentially as early as fall 2026, Roman could uncover many more of these dramatic events and offer a new way to explore how stars, galaxies, and ****** holes formed and evolved over time.

“We can take these three objects as a blueprint to know what to look for in the future,” Payne said.

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