Original title: Researchers have discovered 18 new black hole-devouring stars.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently issued a bulletin saying that a team led by researchers from the university has discovered 18 new tidal disintegration events in which black holes devour stars within 600 million light-years from Earth, more than doubling the number of such events known in nearby space. Related ** was published in the new issue of the American Journal of Astrophysics.
A tidal disintegration event is a high-energy burst in the universe, in which a star is sucked in and torn apart by the tidal force generated by the black hole when it gets too close to a supermassive black hole. When black holes feast on the stars, they release enormous amounts of energy in multiple bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. Previously, scientists have detected tidal disintegration events primarily by looking for typical bursts in the visible and X-ray bands, and more than a dozen such events have already been detected in the universe near Earth.
The new study uses infrared observations to find more of these events from galaxies. The researchers analyzed observations from the U.S. Wide-Area Infrared Sky Survey Satellite and used a specific algorithm to identify infrared bursts from about 1,000 galaxies within 600 million light-years of Earth. Subsequently, the researchers amplified the infrared burst signals of each of these galaxies to find infrared radiation patterns that matched the characteristics of tidal disintegration events, and finally found 18 clear tidal disintegration event signals.
The researchers say the new findings help answer several key questions about the study of tidal disintegration events. In the past, tidal disintegration events have mostly been observed in so-called "post-starburst galaxies", a rare class of galaxies that were once "radiant" due to the formation of a large number of stars but have since cooled down. The new study found tidal disintegration events in other types of galaxies, such as dust galaxies, suggesting that black holes can devour stars in a range of galaxies, not just those in "post-starstorm galaxies."
The results of the study also explain the problem of "energy deficit". Physicists have theorized that tidal disintegration events should emit more energy than has been observed. The study suggests that if the tidal disintegration event occurred in a dust galaxy, this energy difference might be explained. Dust can absorb not only visible light and X-rays, but also extreme ultraviolet radiation, and the energy it absorbs is equivalent to the "missing energy" of **.
In addition, the researchers combined the newly discovered tidal disintegration event with previous observations to estimate that a galaxy experiences a tidal disintegration event in which a black hole devours a star on an average of about 50,000 years.
ENDS) **Xinhua News Agency].