A lot of this tidal disruption happens early on, and we were able to catch this event right at the beginning, within one week of the black hole starting to feed on the star. Or, as the researchers glibly put it, a “hyper-feeding frenzy”.ĭr Pasham added: “It’s probably swallowing the star at the rate of half the mass of the Sun per year. Regarding AT 2022cmc specifically, Dr Matteo Lucchini said: “We found that the jet speed is 99.99 percent the speed of light.” To produce such an intense jet, the team set, the black hole must be in an extremely active phase. Eventually, this twisted field becomes so strong that it accelerates particles away from the black hole along the axis of rotation - forming the jets. (Image credit: ESA/NASA ) The Eye of the Sahara. This, the team believe, must have been powered by what they call an “extreme accretion episode”, when a huge churning disk of matter forms around a black hole - from, for instance, a star being torn apart by tidal forces.įriction between the materials swirling around in this disk causes it to get hot and, according to the leading theory, produce powerful magnetic fields that are twisted by the rotation of the jets and the black hole, forming tight cones at the hole’s rotational poles. Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers snapped this photo of a lava crater in Mauritania from the International Space Station. See Also: 10 Jaw-Dropping Videos Of Amazing Scientific Phenomena. We are living in a Golden Age for those who are interested in scientific phenomena. There are many dangerous phenomena lurking in the empty, vast darkness. There are not the comforting lights that are lit daily here on Earth if you are afraid of the dark, then space is not the place for you. Space is considered to be a place of extreme blackness. SpaceX delays mission to put first private and Japanese lander on Moon Ĭontinuing to study the signal’s activity over various optical, radio, ultraviolet and X-ray telescopes, the team noted an extreme luminosity in the X-ray band - one that swung wildly by a factor of 500 over the course of a few weeks. The world is an amazing place, sometimes more so than we ever imagine. This is just another of the scary facts about space. NASA cancels expensive greenhouse gas monitoring satellite Įarly-stage Alzheimer’s disease could be detected from urine samples In contrast, Dr Pasham explained, “this particular event was 100 times more powerful than the most powerful gamma-ray burst afterglow. These are extreme radiation emissions - starting with gamma rays, followed by an afterglow across the longer wavelengths of the spectrum - that are released in jets when massive stars go supernova, leaving behind either a neutron star or a black hole. In the 1950s, though, they discovered that those elements weren’t nearly light enough to account for. Typically, the researchers explained, bright flashes in the sky are gamma ray bursts. For many years, scientists believed that iron and nickel made up Earth’s innermost layer. Then we looked at it with an X-ray telescope - and what we found was the source was too bright.” Shortly after AT 2022cmc was first detected, Dr Lucchini and his colleague Dr Dheeraj Pasham set about analysing its signal using the “Neutron star Interior Composition ExploreR” (NICER) - an X-ray telescope which operates on the International Space Station.ĭr Pasham said: “Things looked pretty normal the first three days.
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