NASA Telescopes Work Out Black Hole’s Snack Schedule | Space

By using new data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory as well as ESA’s XMM-Newton, a team of researchers have made important headway in understanding how — and when — a supermassive black hole obtains and then consumes material, as described in our latest press release.

This artist’s impression shows a star that has partially been disrupted by such a black hole in the system known as AT2018fyk. The supermassive black hole in AT2018fyk — with about 50 million times more mass than the sun — is in the center of a galaxy located about 860 million light-years from Earth.

Astronomers have determined that a star is on a highly elliptical orbit around the black hole in AT2018fyk so that its point of farthest approach from the black hole is much larger than its closest. During its closest approach, tidal forces from the black hole pull some material from the star, producing two tidal tails of “stellar debris”.

The illustration shows a point in the orbit soon after the star is partially destroyed, when the tidal tails are still in close proximity to the star. Later in the star’s orbit, the disrupted material returns to the black hole and loses energy, leading to a large increase in X-ray brightness occurring later in the orbit (not shown here). This process repeats each time the star returns to its point of closest approach,…