![]() If it did, living on such a planet would be truly surreal, with the black hole filling nearly half the sky and concentrating leftover photons from the big bang into a pseudosun. So is there any way aliens could live on a world that actually orbited one of these cosmic beasts? Surprisingly, the answer is a tentative yes, researchers say, although there are plenty of reasons why life could never take hold in such a place. “We want to find as many as we can,” Yao said.Supermassive black holes have a reputation for consuming everything in their path, from gas clouds to entire solar systems. Each new observation offers the potential for new insights or opportunities to confirm what has been observed in AT2021ehb and other tidal disruption events. Yao is also leading an effort to look for more tidal disruption events identified by ZTF and to then observe them with telescopes like Swift, NICER, and NuSTAR. “Our observations of AT2021ehb are in agreement with the idea that magnetic fields have something to do with how the corona forms, and we want to know what’s causing that magnetic field to get so strong.” “We’ve never seen a tidal disruption event with X-ray emission like this without a jet present, and that’s really spectacular because it means we can potentially disentangle what causes jets and what causes coronae,” said Yuhan Yao, a graduate student at Caltech in Pasadena, California, and lead author of the new study. ![]() Coronae emit higher-energy X-rays than any other part of a black hole, but scientists don’t know where the plasma comes from or exactly how it gets so hot. However, with the AT2021ehb tidal event, there were no jets, which made the corona observation unexpected. Scientists were surprised when NuSTAR detected a corona – a cloud of hot plasma, or gas atoms with their electrons stripped away – since coronae usually appear with jets of gas that flow in opposite directions from a black hole. Then, around 300 days after the event was first spotted, NASA’s NuSTAR began observing the system. It was subsequently studied by NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) telescope (which observes longer X-ray wavelengths than Swift). The event was first spotted on March 1, 2021, by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), located at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California. The work demonstrates how the destruction of a star by a black hole – a process formally known as a tidal disruption event – could be used to better understand what happens to material that’s captured by one of these behemoths before it’s fully devoured. NASA’s NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescopic Array) satellite is the most sensitive space telescope capable of observing these wavelengths of light, and the event’s proximity provided an unprecedented view of the corona’s formation and evolution, according to a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal. ![]() This indicated that as the stellar material was pulled toward its doom, it formed an extremely hot structure above the black hole called a corona. Once the star had been thoroughly ruptured by the black hole’s gravity, astronomers saw a dramatic rise in high-energy X-ray light around the black hole. Located about 250 million light-years from Earth in the center of another galaxy, it was the fifth-closest example of a black hole destroying a star ever observed. ![]() Multiple NASA telescopes recently observed a massive black hole tearing apart an unlucky star that wandered too close.
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