Is Earth in danger? NASA's alarming discovery of a star being consumed by a black hole spark concerns
supermassive black hole
has been seen swallowing a star within the outer space of its host galaxy for the first time ever.
Tired of too many ads? go ad free now
The landmark finding refutes the age-old belief that such types of catastrophic events take place only in the immediate vicinity of galaxies' centers. The strange event, called "
AT2024tvd
," was 600 million light-years away and is the first-ever detection of an offset tidal disruption event (TDE) observed by optical sky surveys.
Astronomers uncover a rare "wandering" black hole tearing apart a star
A Tidal Disruption Event (TDE) is when a star strays too close to a
black hole
and gets torn apart by the intense gravitational pull of the black hole.
This is in fact known as "spaghettification," where the star gets stretched out into thin, filamentary threads, creating shock waves and unleashing a tremendous release of energy. This disastrous event sends energetic pulses of radiation that are detectable over many wavelengths of light, from X-rays to optical radiation. TDEs are typically associated with the violent gravitational forces around the centers of galaxies, where supermassive black holes reside.
The "AT2024tvd" event is a breakthrough in our understanding of black holes. It was discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and further verification through observations by
's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory, and this discovery unlocked a black hole's activity in a most unexpected manner: a "wandering" supermassive black hole, of order 1 million solar masses in mass, not residing at the center of its host galaxy.
Tired of too many ads? go ad free now
This is the first time that offset TDEs have been detected by optical sky surveys, presenting a new glimpse of the mysterious population of nomadic black holes. Yuhan Yao, the lead study author and University of California, Berkeley astrophysicist, pointed to the significance of the find: "This is the first offset TDE found by optical sky surveys. It opens up the whole possibility of discovering this rare population of wanderlust black holes."
New insights into wandering black holes through TDEs
The star was engulfed by the black hole and in doing so triggered a brilliant flash of light—a more luminous and hotter supernova explosion than normal.
So bright was the burst that it initiated a deluge of follow-up observations by a range of telescopes around the globe. These have cast invaluable light on the behavior of black holes, especially those that wander away from galaxy centers. The discovery not only reveals an oft-noted and never-before-seen phenomenon, but also gives us a new perspective on how black holes and their role in the universe can be studied.
This short-term phenomenon was detected through optical sky surveys, which are designed to monitor transient astronomical phenomena. The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) played a crucial role in detecting this event, and subsequent observations through NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory confirmed its significance. According to Ryan Chornock, a ZTF team member, "Now we can use TDEs to find them [wandering black holes]."
Optical surveys application in TDE detection can revolutionize the way black holes are searched and studied in the universe. The achievement provides scientists with a useful tool to detect rogue black holes, which were thought to be almost impossible to detect.
Mysterious forces of black holes and their impact on the universe
A black hole is a region of space in which the gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can get away. Black holes form when a massive star collapses in on itself because of its own gravity after it has burned all of its nuclear fuel.
Black holes are invisible, but it could be possible to deduce that they exist based on observing the way that they alter the movement of nearby stars, gas, and light. An illustration is erratically moving stars or material sucked into a glowing disk surrounding a black hole as indirect signs of their presence.
Can a black hole approach Earth? While sensational in its possibility, the likelihood of a black hole approaching Earth is extremely slim.
The nearest known black hole is located thousands of light-years from Earth, and even a rogue black hole such as the one measured by this research is hundreds of millions of light-years from Earth. This provides some level of security for our solar system because black holes do not pose an immediate danger to Earth.
This historic first-ever offset TDE discovery is a new chapter in black hole science, yielding new knowledge on the misbehavior of supermassive black holes and its effects.
As the astrophysical community continues to study this event and other such events, we wait with bated breath for more light to be shed on the universe's most enigmatic objects. With the use of TDEs as a method of finding rogue black holes, scientists are set to explore even deeper the nature of these space monsters.
Also Read |
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Indian Express
2 days ago
- Indian Express
How AI is changing the way we discover cosmic events
Astronomers have recorded what could be the first known case of a massive star exploding while interacting with a black hole, a finding that could potentially lead to the discovery of an entirely new class of stellar explosions. The star, named SN 2023zkd, was first observed in July 2023, in California by the Zwicky Transient Facility. About 730 million light-years away, in a galaxy with minimal star formation activity, the star was detected using artificial intelligence (AI) designed to instantly identify unusual cosmic phenomena. According to a statement, the early warning allowed telescopes in space and around the world to begin observations immediately, capturing the event in its initial stages. Ashley Villar, an associate professor of astronomy at Harvard University and a co-author of the study, stated, '2023zkd shows some of the clearest signs we've seen of a massive star interacting with a companion before explosion. We think this might be part of a whole class of hidden explosions that AI will help us discover.' Initially, the star appeared to be a typical supernova — a bright flare gradually diminishing over time, signalling the death of a substantial star. However, astronomers observed that it brightened again months later. Historical data revealed that the system's brightness had been steadily increasing for nearly four years, or 1,500 days, prior to the explosion. Such an extended pre-explosion phase is uncommon and indicates the star was under considerable gravitational stress. Experts suggest that the most plausible scenario is that the star was caught in the orbit of a black hole. Evidence from light curves and spectra shows the star experienced two significant eruptions in the years before its end, releasing large amounts of gas. The initial light peak of the explosion was caused by the blast wave, while a slower, prolonged collision with a dense, disc-shaped cloud produced a second peak months later. Over time, the black hole's gravitational pull may have caused the star to collapse. The team also hypothesises that the star might have been consumed by the black hole before it could explode naturally. In that case, the supernova's light would have originated from debris colliding with the surrounding gas. Either way, a more massive black hole would result. SN 2023zkd 'is the strongest evidence to date that such close interactions can detonate a star,' said Alexander Gagliano, lead author of the study and a researcher at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions. 'We've known for some time that most massive stars are in binaries, but catching one in the act of exchanging mass shortly before it explodes is incredibly rare,' he said. The scientists believe these results demonstrate how AI can identify rare cosmic events in time for detailed scrutiny. They also emphasise the importance of future facilities like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which can survey the entire southern sky every few nights from its location in the Chilean Andes, over the next decade. When paired with real-time AI detection, Rubin Observatory's observations will enable astronomers to better understand the lifecycle of massive stars in binary systems by discovering and analysing more of these uncommon and complex phenomena. 'We're now entering an era where we can automatically detect these rare events as they occur, not just afterwards,' Gagliano stated. 'That means we can finally start linking the way stars live with how they die, and that's incredibly exciting,' he added. A report detailing these findings was published in the Astrophysical Journal on Wednesday, 13 August.
Indian Express
2 days ago
- Indian Express
AI and astronomy: How artificial intelligence is changing the way we discover cosmic events
Astronomers have recorded what could be the first known case of a massive star exploding while interacting with a black hole, a finding that could potentially lead to the discovery of an entirely new class of stellar explosions. This star, named SN 2023zkd, was first observed in July 2023 in California by the Zwicky Transient Facility. About 730 million light-years away, in a galaxy with minimal star formation activity, the star was detected using innovative artificial intelligence (AI) technology designed to instantly identify unusual cosmic phenomena. According to a statement, the early warning allowed telescopes in space and around the world to begin observations immediately, capturing the event in its initial stages. Ashley Villar, an associate professor of astronomy at Harvard University and a co-author of the study, stated, '2023zkd shows some of the clearest signs we've seen of a massive star interacting with a companion before explosion. We think this might be part of a whole class of hidden explosions that AI will help us discover.' Initially, the star appeared to be a typical supernova — a bright flare gradually diminishing over time, signalling the death of a substantial star. However, astronomers observed that it brightened again months later. Historical data revealed that the system's brightness had been steadily increasing for nearly four years, or 1,500 days, prior to the explosion. Such an extended pre-explosion phase is uncommon and indicates the star was under considerable gravitational stress. Experts suggest that the most plausible scenario is that the star was caught in the orbit of a black hole. Evidence from light curves and spectra shows the star experienced two significant eruptions in the years before its end, releasing large amounts of gas. The initial light peak of the explosion was caused by the blast wave, while a slower, prolonged collision with a dense, disc-shaped cloud produced a second peak months later. Over time, the black hole's gravitational pull may have caused the star to collapse. The team also hypothesises that the star might have been consumed by the black hole before it could explode naturally. In that case, the supernova's light would have originated from debris colliding with the surrounding gas. Either way, a more massive black hole would result. SN 2023zkd 'is the strongest evidence to date that such close interactions can detonate a star,' said Alexander Gagliano, lead author of the study and a researcher at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions. 'We've known for some time that most massive stars are in binaries, but catching one in the act of exchanging mass shortly before it explodes is incredibly rare.' The scientists believe these results demonstrate how AI can identify rare cosmic events in time for detailed scrutiny. They also emphasise the importance of future facilities like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which can survey the entire southern sky every few nights from its location in the Chilean Andes, over the next decade. When paired with real-time AI detection, Rubin Observatory's observations will enable astronomers to better understand the lifecycle of massive stars in binary systems by discovering and analysing more of these uncommon and complex phenomena. 'We're now entering an era where we can automatically detect these rare events as they occur, not just afterwards,' Gagliano stated. 'That means we can finally start linking the way stars live with how they die, and that's incredibly exciting,' he added. A report detailing these findings was published in the Astrophysical Journal on Wednesday, 13 August.
Indian Express
3 days ago
- Indian Express
Galaxies flying away from us: How Hubble's redshift led us to the Big Bang
On a crisp night in the late 1920s, Edwin Hubble stood in the dome of the 100-inch Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory, high above the smog and streetlamps of Los Angeles. Through that giant eye, he measured the light from distant 'spiral nebulae' — what we now call galaxies — and found something remarkable. Their light was shifted toward the red end of the spectrum, a sign that they were racing away from us. It was as if the universe itself were stretching. When light from a moving source is stretched to longer wavelengths, we call it redshift — much like the way a passing train's whistle drops in pitch as it moves away. Hubble discovered that the farther a galaxy was, the greater its redshift — meaning the faster it was receding. This became the Hubble–Lemaître law, a simple but revolutionary equation showing that the universe is expanding. But here's the subtlety: the galaxies are not flying through space as bullets through the air. Instead, the space between them is stretching. A common analogy is raisin bread dough rising in the oven — as the dough expands, every raisin moves away from every other raisin, and the farther apart two raisins start, the faster they separate. Crucially, the bread isn't expanding into the kitchen; the dough itself is the 'space.' In the same way, the universe isn't expanding into some empty void — it's the distance scale itself that's growing. This is why galaxies farther away show greater redshift: they're not just distant in space, they're distant in time, and the intervening space has been stretching for billions of years. The implication was staggering: if the galaxies are all moving apart today, then in the distant past, they must have been much closer together. Follow this logic far enough back and you arrive at a moment when all the matter, energy, space, and time we know were compressed into a single, unimaginably dense point. The first to put this into words was Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest and physicist. In 1931, he proposed that the universe began from a 'primeval atom' — an idea that would later be nicknamed the Big Bang. At the time, the name was meant to be dismissive; British astronomer Fred Hoyle, along with his student and celebrated Indian astrophysicist Jayant Narlikar, champions of the rival Steady State theory, coined it in a radio broadcast to mock the idea of a cosmic explosion. Ironically, the label stuck and became the most famous phrase in cosmology. For decades, the debate raged: was the universe eternal and unchanging, or did it have a beginning? The tie was broken not in an ivory tower, but in a New Jersey field. In 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, two engineers at Bell Labs, were testing a radio antenna for satellite communications when they picked up a persistent hiss of microwave noise. They cleaned the antenna, even shooed away nesting pigeons — but the signal stayed. Unbeknownst to them, just 50 km away, Princeton physicist Robert Dicke and his team were preparing to search for the faint afterglow of the Big Bang. When the groups connected, the truth emerged: Penzias and Wilson had stumbled upon the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the fossil light from the universe's infancy, released about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. The CMB confirmed that the universe had indeed begun in a hot, dense state and has been cooling and expanding ever since. In the first fraction of a second, an incredible burst of inflation stretched space faster than the speed of light. This expansion wasn't into anything — rather, the very fabric of space itself was stretching, carrying galaxies along with it. As space grows, so does the distance scale we use to measure it: a galaxy whose light left billions of years ago was much closer then than it is today. That's why the farther away we look, the greater the redshift we see — we are peering not just across space, but back in time, to when the universe was smaller. The CMB is the afterglow from a time about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when the universe had cooled enough for electrons and protons to form neutral atoms, letting light travel freely for the first time. That light has been on a 13.8-billion-year journey to us, its wavelength stretched by cosmic expansion from the fierce glare of the early universe into the faint microwave glow we detect today. Over the next minutes after the Big Bang, nuclear fusion forged the first elements: hydrogen, helium, and traces of lithium. Hundreds of millions of years later, the first stars and galaxies ignited, manufacturing heavier elements in their cores and seeding the cosmos with the building blocks of planets and life. Billions of years on, our Sun and Earth formed from recycled stardust, and here we are — creatures of carbon, contemplating the birth of time. The Big Bang theory is not just an origin story; it's a framework that explains everything from the cosmic web of galaxies to the faintest ripples in the CMB. It predicts the abundance of light elements, the distribution of galaxies, and the universe's large-scale geometry. Without it, we'd have no coherent picture of cosmic history. Today, the expansion first seen by Hubble is still ongoing — in fact, it's accelerating, driven by the mysterious dark energy. The latest measurements from telescopes like Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, and surveys like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey continue to refine our understanding of the early universe, probing the first galaxies that emerged from cosmic darkness. The journey from a lone astronomer squinting at galaxies to a global scientific collaboration mapping the cosmos is a reminder that big ideas often start with small clues. As Carl Sagan once put it, 'We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.' The Big Bang is not just about how the universe began — it's about how we began, too. Shravan Hanasoge is an astrophysicist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.
