A black hole swallowed a star and created a donut the size of the solar system
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A black hole swallowed a star and created a donut the size of the solar system

Astronomers used NASA's legendary Hubble Space Telescope to record detailed observations of the last moments of a star's life before it was torn apart by a black hole.

The violent collision, also known as a "tidal disruption event", simultaneously pulls material out of the star and also blasts radiation into space. This creates a massive donut-shaped gas cloud.

According to a NASA blog post, astronomers used Hubble to focus on the massive gravitational pull on the dying star.

New Hubble readings detail dramatic black hole event

The star being devoured by NASA observations is called AT2022dsb. Although the space agency was unable to photograph the star itself in detail—it is 300 million light-years away—Hubble's readings provided a wealth of data in the form of ultraviolet spectroscopy readings.

NASA explains in a blog post that tidal disruptions are quite rare, as the global astronomical community has detected about 100 such events in total. It is estimated that any galaxy with a stationary supermassive black hole at its center will see it gobble up a star about once every 100 years.

"There are still very few tidal phenomena observed in ultraviolet light given the time of observation," said Emily Engelthaler of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian Institution (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “It's really unfortunate, because you can get a lot of information from ultraviolet spectra. We are happy because we can get these details about what the wreckage is doing. A tidal event can tell us a lot about a black hole. "

New Hubble discovery 'exciting place for scientists'

Hubble's light readings point to a very bright doughnut-shaped region of gas that was once a star. When the black hole ripped apart the star, it left a trail known as a torus. This massive torus orbits the black hole and is roughly the size of our solar system, according to NASA.

"We're really still thinking about this event," said CfA's Petr Maxim. “You crash a star and then you get material that goes into a black hole. So you have models where you think you know what's going on and then you have what you actually see. an interesting place for scientists: right at the junction of the known and the unknown.”

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