The black hole “spits” the star years after it was destroyed…

Burping after they have consumed something is part of the eating behavior of black holes, but it is unclear why this process took three years to occur.

In 2018, astronomers saw a star “eaten by” a black hole in a galaxy 665 million light years from Earth. This phenomenon is common, but what followed three years later surprised the researchers: the black hole returned the destroyed star, as if it was vomiting.

The observation was recorded this week in The Astrophysical Journal. “Nobody’s seen anything like this before,” Yvette Sendez, a research assistant at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead author of the study said in a statement.

She explained that “burping” after eating something is part of the black hole’s eating behavior, but it is not known for certain why this process took three years.

This is a phenomenon called a tidal perturbation event (TDE), which annihilates portions of stars that black holes absorb, releasing a light wave of X-rays. By observing space with the Very Large Array Space Telescope (VLA), astronomers have identified the explosion in a black hole not Devouring nothing else since 2018.

The team combined the TDE observations, which they named AT2018hyz, with different wavelengths of light. For this, VLA was used; ALMA Observatory located in Chile; meerkat in South Africa; Australian Compact Telescope Array (ATCA), in Australia; The Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Neil Jerells Swift Observatory telescopes.

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Tidal breaking events are known to emit light when they occur. When a star approaches a black hole, gravitational forces begin to stretch the star or spaghetti. Eventually, the elongated material orbits around the black hole and heats up, creating a luminous explosion that astronomers can detect millions of light years away.

Some spaghetti stuff is sometimes thrown into space. But this emission, known as outflow, usually occurs right after the TDE — not years later, as was the case with the AT2018hyz.

Edo Berger, professor of astronomy at Harvard University and co-author of the study published in Astrophysics: Journal.

With information from the state agency