What’s going on with this black hole’s star meal?
I just can’t figure this out. But I’m not alone; neither can the astrophysicists or cosmologists, at least so far.
I had originally thought nothing could escape once captured in a black hole, although I later read that Hawking radiation – whatever that really is – could indeed escape. But this isn’t Hawking radiation:
In October 2018, a small star was ripped to shreds when it wandered too close to a black hole in a galaxy located 665 million light years away from Earth. Though it may sound thrilling, the event did not come as a surprise to astronomers who occasionally witness these violent incidents while scanning the night sky.
But nearly three years after the massacre, the same black hole is lighting up the skies again — and it hasn’t swallowed anything new, scientists say.
“This caught us completely by surprise — no one has ever seen anything like this before,” says Yvette Cendes, a research associate at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and lead author of a new study analyzing the phenomenon.
The team concludes that the black hole is now ejecting material traveling at half of the speed of light, but are unsure why the outflow was delayed by several years. The results, described this week in the Astrophysical Journal, may help scientists better understand black holes’ feeding behavior, which Cendes likens to “burping” after a meal…
“We have been studying TDEs [which stands for tidal disruption events “when encroaching stars are spaghettified by black holes”] with radio telescopes for more than a decade, and we sometimes find they shine in radio waves as they spew out material while the star is first being consumed by the black hole,” says Edo Berger, professor of astronomy at Harvard University and the CfA, and co-author on the new study. “But in AT2018hyz there was radio silence for the first three years, and now it’s dramatically lit up to become one of the most radio luminous TDEs ever observed.”
Here’s an explanation for “spaghettification”:
TDEs are well-known for emitting light when they occur. As a star nears a black hole, gravitational forces begin to stretch, or spaghettify, the star. Eventually, the elongated material spirals around the black hole and heats up, creating a flash that astronomers can spot from millions of light years away.
Some spaghettified material occasionally gets flung out back into space. Astronomers liken it to black holes being messy eaters — not everything they try to consume makes it into their mouths.
But the emission, known as an outflow, normally develops quickly after a TDE occurs — not years later. “It’s as if this black hole has started abruptly burping out a bunch of material from the star it ate years ago,” Cendes explains.
Not only that, but these are massive burps, and the burped material is exiting much faster than usual. Apparently this star was exceptionally indigestible.
Here’s a previous article on this “spaghettification” process. An excerpt:
“People have been seeing other evidence of wind coming out of these [TDE] events, and I think this polarization study definitely makes that evidence stronger, in the sense that you wouldn’t get a spherical geometry without having a sufficient amount of wind. The interesting fact here is that a significant fraction of the material in the star that is spiraling inward doesn’t eventually fall into the black hole — it’s blown away from the black hole.”
In the recent case, however, this blowing-away occurred nearly three earth-years later. The initial swallowing took place in October of 2018, and the Big Burp took place in June of 2021.
NOTE: It often seems strange to me to report far-off celestial events with earth-dates such as October of 2018. That of course represents when an event was viewed from earth or whatever orbiting telescope may have sent pictures and data.
Cool stuff. I wonder if the effective impact parameter of the incoming star is important in this type of situation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_parameter
If high angular momentum star material is still stratified inside the event horizon for a period of time only to be burped out later, it would seem to violate the “no-hair theorem.” Though I probably don’t fully understand the theorem.
That would probably also violate the notion of an event horizon. If the stellar material were circulating outside the event horizon, then it should be radiating like crazy. Which in this case it wasn’t?
From Neo’s wiki link
Thus, thermal radiation contains information about the body that emitted it, while Hawking radiation seems to contain no such information, and depends only on the mass, angular momentum, and charge of the black hole (the no-hair theorem). This leads to the black hole information paradox.
I’ve just skimmed this and haven’t had a chance to follow any of the links, but my first guess is that perhaps it is possible for the gravitational force to fluctuate as mass increases. Perhaps, as more mass was gathered by the black hole its distribution became uneven (non-spherical) and this lead to region(s) of the black hole where the gravitational attraction is lessened and mass can escape?
Different forces, of course, but an analogy is pushing on trying to make a balloon more compact by pressing on it. With a balloon small enough to fit between one’s two hands when you compress it the spherical shape can deform into non-spherical shapes. Perhaps as the mass in the black hole is compressed more and more due to the influx of additional mass, a similar thing happens?
The important distinction to make here is that the material never crossed the event horizon. Once that happens nothing can get back out. I hate it when they don’t make that clear.
The forces in play here are, well, astronomical. This is a gross oversimplification, but imagine an entire stars worth of material (one million earths) trying to get down the same bathroom drain. All in motion at a significant percentage of the speed of light (as it truly gets near the horizon), and there are intense magnetic fields involved as well. It’s going to be an unholy mess. This is why black holes are said to be “messy eaters”.
But nothing gets “ejected from the black hole” if you regard the boundary as the event horizon, as I think most people intuitively do.
I have been a fan of Sci-Fi for more than 70 years. It has gotten far more interesting of late now that real scientists are writing it.
not everything they try to consume makes it into their mouths.
That’s the best quote from the article.
The team concludes that the black hole is now ejecting material…
That’s the worst.
Hawking radiation doesn’t exactly escape; virtual particle/anti-particle pairs are constantly being created everywhere in the universe, and as a rule they attract and annihilate each other, which balances everything back out. But when that happens near a black hole’s event horizon, sometimes one is swallowed before it can find its partner. The partner zooms off as Hawking radiation; the swallowed, having negative mass, reduces the black hole’s size.
The smaller the black hole, the more Hawking radiation released and the quicker the black hole ‘evaporates.’
Part of the fun here is that the so-called ‘speed of light’ is more accurately the ‘speed of cause and effect.’ That is, anything that can escape from a black hole’s Schwartzchild Radius isn’t just moving faster than light; it’s traveling through time, and escaping before whatever pushed it faster than light happened.
Can something travel faster than light inside the Schwartzchild Radius? Maybe, but it’s not even clear if the question has meaning. The Schwartzchild Radius is an event horizon because any event on the other side is beyond out perception.
I blame UFOs and OMB.
Sabine is on the case!
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Black holes don’t puke. They just sometimes don’t clear their plate.
–Sabine Hossenfelder, “Black Holes: Do they really “spit out” stuff?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPupnpSB8YU
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Hmm…Sabine’s transcripts are now punctuated. Cool!
My guess is that a human adds in the punctuation and caps to the raw text from the speech recognition app.
except doesn’t dissapear, it’s converted to energy, aren’t we dealing with theoretical constructs up to the point, one could observe it directly, and we’re currently observing from a time difference of say 400 million years,
Neo, you’re right about the strangeness of the dates. One must admit that it’s less telegenic, or the typographical equivalent, to speak of something as having happened in 664,997,982 BC (a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…).
The anthropomorphization of black holes is kind of cute, though. “Feeding behavior”… “messy eaters”. Maybe there are feeding stations for black holes out there somewhere to help them get through the lean times.
so then you have to figure, how close to any star be to a black hole, assuming that planetary systems form roughly like ours, about 2-3 billion at the very least, so the matter from the star itself would go in last,
Mike Pliass @3:46,
Again, I just skimmed and didn’t follow the link, but if what you write is correct (and I don’t doubt it is) it’s journalism malfeasance of the highest order. Ignore my comment.
Oh yes. Science journalists are only one step above regular journalists.
Where in the deep dark past is the missing link between journalists and science journalists? Did they evolve by isolation or revolution? Steven J. Gould took the secret with him?
The “journalists” at Scientific American now publish popular political science, as do all the others, Nature, Science, GSA Bulletin, etc. IMO
Time dilation might be accounting for some of this it was noted in interstellat which has planets improbably too close to a black hole
Ostensibly kip thorne was the technical advisor so he thought it was possible but unlikely
I’ve had a busy day and just got around to watching the Sabine Hossenfelder video that huxley posted. It’s good, entertaining as always, and she handles it well. Highly recommend. Sometimes things dawn on you that you breezed by before. The black hole in question is 665 million light years away. This three year span of time that has caused such a stir occurred not before dinosaurs went extinct, but before they even evolved as a species. We are just now watching “live”. Nothing like astronomy to blow one’s mind.
}}} although I later read that Hawking radiation – whatever that really is
OK, I am not a serious expert, but:
Black holes are a direct result of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
Einstein never accepted the notion of Quantum Mechanics, claiming, “God does not play dice with the universe.”
(Then) Young Hawking made his name for himself by applying and resolving the different threads of QM and the ToR. He followed this up by then demonstrating that black holes are not, strictly speaking, “black”, due to QM.
You may understand that the notion of QM, that subatomic particles (everything, really, but it really only matters on that really small scale for the most part) don’t really have a fixed “state” until you actually decide to examine them. Prior to that there is a “statistical probability cloud” which defines where they MIGHT be — which can nominally be anywhere in the universe, though it’s REALLY REALLY likely to be in a very small volume. But it can be anywhere at any given time.
This seems truly odd, but has been confirmed — there is an electronics component called a “Josephson Junction”, which uses a superconducting wire meeting another superconducting wire with an insulator between them. A particle can still transition this insulator, because it “teleports”, via that cloud. One moment it is on one side of it, unable to proceed forwards — then it “decides” it’s on the other side, and zips off to wherever the superconductor leads it to be.
SO:
The “boundary” for the black hole is a fixed distance from the center of it, a “singularity” (which is physics-speak for “we have no idea wtf happens here — None whatsoever.Yes, it’s a mystery wrapped inside a conundrum wrapped inside a riddle-filled enigma to us…”)
Now — consider a QM particle (e.g., an electron, proton, or other sub-atomic particle) is a cloud of position, not an exact position…. Right?
So — what can happen if it approaches that boundary… one moment it is inside of it… the next, it appears outside of it… right? Just like the Josephson Junction…?
And THAT is “Hawking Radiation”. Hawking demonstrated that “Black holes are not really black”… just a very very dark grey.
Anyone wants to provide an addendum or clarification to this, feel free. It’s simply my own general comprehension of How This Shit Works.
}}} Can something travel faster than light inside the Schwartzchild Radius? Maybe, but it’s not even clear if the question has meaning. The Schwartzchild Radius is an event horizon because any event on the other side is beyond out perception.
This is where that whole “singularity” thing comes into play. The word, like “infinity”, is a placeholder for “We don’t have any idea WtF happens”.
We can play a little with these two concepts, and learn a bit, but we really don’t “understand” them in any way.
An interesting example for “infinity” is the fact that we currently (AFAIK) ack there are actually two different “values” for infinity — Aleph-Null and Aleph-One (usually denoted by the Hebrew “A” — “Aleph” and a subscript “0” or “1 — but blogspot does not support most of the unicode font, so, “nopes” on the proper display).
“How can two values for “infinity” exist?
Well, a prime example of Infinity is the set of “counting numbers”: 1, 2, 3, 4… and so on, to infinity.
Another example of Infinity is the set of “Real Numbers” — not just 1, 2, 3, 4, but also the collection of rational numbers: “1/2, 1/3, 2/3, 1/4, 3/4, 1/5…” etc. THEN there is a collection of numbers called “Irrational” numbers, which are numbers that cannot be represented by “rational” means, e.g., as a fraction. The most famous of these is Pi, but many square roots, e.g., the square root of 2 or 3, also are examples of these.
The “Real number line” is the set of all the above, plus their “negative” values.
So — just by including the counting numbers, this set is infinite.
So — how do we know they are not “the same size”?
Well, consider that we have a theater auditorium, of “infinite” size, with each seat having a counting number attached to it. Well, now we start taking numbers (“points”) on the Real Number Line and assign each one a seat in our theater…
It is possible to mathematically prove that we will run out of seats before we run out of points on the Real Number Line. No, I shan’t bother to provide the proof — if it intrigues you, feel free to dig into it. I do not believe it is too hard to follow if you have any math-proof ability at all.
There has been some speculation that “the number of curves in the Euclidean/Complex plane” is Aleph-Two, but the last I heard, that had been neither proven nor disproven.
In short — while “Infinity” and “Singularity” mostly mean, “We don’t understand these, we just named them”, we do have some ability to play with them and learn things — just not really develop a full utilitarized comprehension of them.
}}} Hawking radiation doesn’t exactly escape; virtual particle/anti-particle pairs are constantly being created everywhere in the universe, and as a rule they attract and annihilate each other, which balances everything back out. But when that happens near a black hole’s event horizon, sometimes one is swallowed before it can find its partner. The partner zooms off as Hawking radiation; the swallowed, having negative mass, reduces the black hole’s size.
Mrrr… antiparticles don’t have “negative mass” — last I heard, mass was an entirely positive number… I may be wrong, but that’s the last I was aware of.
But this is another example of how some of the stuff in the universe Gets Real Weird when it comes to QM, particularly where Black Holes, and their singularities, are concerned — and why at the deepest level, Physics people are both mystified and enthralled by the notion of Black Holes, because they represent all the crap we can barely understand at all… It leads to premature hair loss on a routine basis.
Not only are Black Holes themselves able to “emit” stuff, they also can swallow “half of the stuff that the universe just created but only for a fraction of a moment”, leading to a permanent creation of stuff… which violates the “Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy”… which is a very cherished idea. Singularities do that kind of thing, which is why physics people have a Special Name for them.
Is it really creating more mass or is the mass compressed the singularity is the visible part righf whats called an einstein rosenman bridge
The answer is obvious, the law of indigestion.
The images from the James Web Space Telescope have cast serious doubt on the standard model of the cosmos, i.e., the Big Bang. There is another model, Plasma Cosmology, that accounts for the phenomena observed in the cosmos without relying on hypothetical constructs like black holes, dark matter, etc; the well-known natural laws of electromagnetism, demonstrated experimentally in labs for over a century, are all that’s required. Why haven’t you heard of it? The astrophysical community has been propping up the Big Bang, unwilling to consider alternatives despite its problems. This article from IAI by Dr. Eric Lerner, a plasma scientist, will explain:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlFpq49Ri8Y&t=2936s
Speaking in general terms, isn’t time *very* dilated in the vicinity of the event horizon, for particles on geodetic lines that come very close to, but do not cross, the event horizon?
If the star approached the black hole on a trajectory that just barely grazed the event horizon (basically an orbit with a periapsis at or just above the Schwarzschild radius), or a bit of the star’s infalling gas got accelerated onto such a trajectory, might time dilation alone account for the subjective slowness of that close approach as seen by a distant observer, i.e. us?
In the proper time of the gas, it saw no delay at all, just a very fast pass through periapsis, but an observer at a moderate distance might have watched it traverse that trajectory in slow motion (with any radiation generated during the close approach being very faint due to the extreme gravitational redshift?), and at a greater distance, it would look as if the gas disappeared and then reappeared after a delay?
There’s still a lot we don’t understand about gravity. Under the known laws of thermodynamics, nebulae shouldn’t be able to so massively reverse the overall trend toward increasing entropy and decreasing energy without sapient intervention, yet we’ve watched them do just that repeatedly.
At this point we’re essentially at the primitive stage in astrophysics where we’re watching birds and bugs and even bats, and asking, “If they can fly, why can’t I?”
And there’s no way to tell exactly which “That’s odd…” moment will result in a discovery that lets us escape and possibly even prevent the heat-death of the universe.
Sheer mass of the nebula i suppose
In interstellar they placed a planrt on the edge of a black hole and it somehow sustained an atmosphere unpossible
While being a complete amateur on such subjects, yet utterly fascinated by them. I think I would fall on the Time Dilation side of things.
From our frame of reference the matter is coming out 3 years later. But that is irrelevant from the point of the matter. If we had been able to measure things from the perspective of the matter. It probably would have seemed like only a small fraction of that.
Now if it could be shown that the matter passed the event horizon. Then we clearly demonstrate that we do not have a particularly firm grasp of physics of black holes.
As so many theories abound about how such massive structures actually operate. I think astrophysics needs to seriously consider (if it has not already) that this particular field requires something along the lines of sub-atomic theories. That the testable and observable physics we regularly rely on for daily life. Simply falls apart at the testable micro and macro limits of what we observe
To say nothing can exit a black hole’s event horizon is not exactly true. Gravitational waves are generated by accelerating masses and, therefore such things as black holes in orbits. These have some energy as they change distances between masses and exert forces on matter. Energy has some mass. These waves therefore have some e=mc^2 mass. So black holes are allowing some mass to escape the event horizon in the form of these waves.
Perhaps if the mass equivalent of gravitational waves were larger or if the black hole was larger, these waves could not leave the black hole and we would truly have no way to detect them. Perhaps there are such massive black holes that they are truly undetectable and they do not change the curvature of spacetime or emit gravitational waves.
Jack Woodward:
Not exactly. Please see this.
Boobah’s explanation of Hawking Radiation is different from what I read about 2 years ago. There it was described as material that was able to ‘escape’ as the black hole grew old and its gravitational strength weaken.
I am always impressed and amused by the erudition of people in these discussions.
Now we find ourselves investigating the eructation of ‘Black Holes’. I have questions for anyone who can lend insight into the science behind these enigmas.
There are 4 mathematical Black Hole solutions to Einstein’s field equation of gravity in special relativity. To define the terms, Q= electric charge and J= spin angular momentum.
1)Schwarzchild requires that Q=0 and J=0 with the cosmological constant=0, with the gravitating mass isolated in a vacuum in a one mass universe where the black hole is the only mass that exists.
2)Kerr requires that Q=0 and J = not 0, again with the gravitating mass isolated in a vacuum in a one mass universe where the black hole is the only mass that exists.
3)Reissner-Nordstrom requires that Q= not 0 and J=0 with a static metric in which Nothing Is Moving i.e. the gravitational field of an electrically charged* non-rotating spherically symmetrical body of mass where nothing moves. (It strikes me that this precludes the possibility of collapse, being inwardly directed movement.)
4)Kerr-Newman requires that Q= not 0 and J= not 0 with the cosmological constant =0. This solution is dismissed because observed astronomical objects do not possess appreciable net electric charge.(*this objection also applies to #3)
The first three solutions do not describe the universe I observe that is populated with millions of galaxies and billions of stars, none isolated, all whizzing around interacting gravitationally, and traveling in an interstellar medium composed of electromagnetic ionized plasma that ebbs and flows. Our space probes and telescopes have indeed found that electrical charge separation exists in space.
In my book one does not get to create a black hole in the isolated abstract environment of your computer model code and then get to plunk this math generated invisible phantom down willy nilly in the universe to explain something you can not explain.
“…now it’s dramatically lit up to become one of the most radio luminous TDEs ever observed.”
In the physics lab we observe that radio emissions are generated by electric currents flowing in conductors. In nature we observe that electrical lighting discharges through an atmospheric ionized conducting plasma pathway while generating intense radio emissions.
My conjecture is that the swirling cloud of spagetified plasma is highly conductive. A fluctuating magnetic field produces an electric current in a conductor. The Electric current produces radio emissions. They are observing cosmic scale lightning.
Cosmology needs to incorporate plasma physics into the inertia/gravity model.
Rip the black hole band aid off the failing model. It will be painful to many. Hubble and Webb are illuminating our ignorance and it is a glorious thing to witness…unexpectedly.
A Mark Twain Quote is apt: “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
Here comes a Uranaus joke!