![]() In addition, every galaxy seems to have at its core a supersize version of one of these monsters millions or billions of times as massive as the sun. Our Milky Way galaxy, and presumably most galaxies, are littered with black holes produced when massive stars died and collapsed in on themselves. ![]() They are so deep and dense that nothing, not even light, can escape them. In the subsequent five months the flare slowly faded.īlack holes are gravitational potholes in space-time predicted by general relativity, Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity. At its peak, it was blasting out about a billion times as much energy as our sun. Over the next few weeks the flare rapidly brightened. (“AT” stands for “astronomical transient.”) The flare had the hallmarks of a tidal disruption event, the technical name for when a black hole rips a star to shreds and eats it.Īstronomers rushed to their ground- and space-based telescopes to monitor AT2019qiz, as the flare was named. 19, 2019, when the Zwicky Transient Facility, a telescope on Palomar Mountain in California, and other celestial surveillance networks detected a flare in the center of a galaxy 215 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus. The rest of its disintegrated material was blown outward into space at a breakneck speed a few percent that of light. In the end, she said, only about half the star was consumed by the black hole. ![]() “This black hole was a messy eater,” added Kate Alexander of Northwestern University and a member of Dr.
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