Latest news with #YuhanYao
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Hubble spots a roaming black hole light-years from where it belongs
A black hole skulking in the shadows 600 million light-years away in space gave itself away with a dazzling flash, the light of a star it had just gnashed and eaten. Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories, astronomers found the cosmic object in an unexpected place. Rather than sitting dead center in its galaxy like most supermassive black holes, this one was thousands of light-years away from the core — 2,600, in fact. What's more, there is another enormous black hole that is the actual nucleus. While the catawampus black hole has the mass of 1 million suns, the one that defines the galactic center is 100 million times the mass of the sun. The burst of radiation detected, known as a tidal disruption event or TDE, began when a star wandered too close to the black hole. If not for that stellar snack, the black hole would have escaped astronomers' notice. "It opens up the entire possibility of uncovering this elusive population of wandering black holes with future sky surveys," said study author Yuhan Yao of UC Berkeley in a statement. "I think this discovery will motivate scientists to look for more examples of this type of event." SEE ALSO: Soviets were headed to Venus in 1972. The spacecraft is about to return. The Hubble Space Telescope, a partnership of NASA and the European Space Agency, confirms the presence of a wandering supermassive black hole, 600 million light-years from Earth. Credit: NASA Out of about 100 TDE events discovered through surveys so far, this one, dubbed AT2024tvd, is the first scientists have seen emerging from a supermassive black hole that is not a galactic nucleus. The research team's findings, announced by NASA, will be published in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Black holes are some of the most inscrutable phenomena in outer space. About 50 years ago, they were little more than a theory — a kooky mathematical answer to a physics problem. Even astronomers at the top of their field weren't entirely convinced they existed. Today, not only are black holes accepted science, they're getting their pictures taken by a collection of enormous, synced-up radio dishes on Earth. Unlike a planet or star, black holes don't have surfaces. Instead, they have a boundary called an "event horizon," or a point of no return. If anything swoops too close, like the doomed aforementioned star, it will fall in, never to escape the hole's gravitational clutch. The most common kind, called a stellar black hole, is thought to be the result of an enormous star dying in a supernova explosion. The star's material then collapses onto itself, condensing into a relatively tiny area. How supermassive black holes form is even more elusive. Astrophysicists believe these invisible giants lurk in the heart of virtually all galaxies. Recent Hubble observations have bolstered the theory that they begin in the dusty cores of starburst galaxies, where new stars are rapidly assembled, but scientists are still teasing that out. A supermassive black hole is off-center in a galaxy 600 million light-years from Earth. Credit: NASA / ESA / STScI / Ralf Crawford illustration As the star was stretched and torn asunder in the TDE, some of its gas formed a glowing ring around the black hole. The resulting flare flashed brightly in ultraviolet and visible light. Telescopes on the ground, such as the Zwicky Transient Facility in California, first detected it. But it was Hubble that confirmed the flare's off-center location. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in space and the Very Large Array in New Mexico provided supporting data. The two supermassive black holes both reside in the same galaxy, yet they are not a binary pair, meaning they're not bound to each other through gravity. Scientists don't know how the wandering black hole got there. A star's remnants form a disk around a hidden supermassive black hole. Credit: NASA / ESA / STScI / Ralf Crawford illustration One possibility is that the smaller black hole came from a smaller galaxy that at some point merged with the larger one, bringing its central black hole along for the ride. Eventually, the smaller black hole may spiral into the larger one. For now, it's doing its own thing. Another possibility is that it was ganged up on by a couple of bully black holes. In so-called three-body interactions, the lowest-mass object can be evicted from the center of a galaxy, with the two others remaining in the galaxy's core. "Theorists have predicted that a population of massive black holes located away from the centers of galaxies must exist," said Ryan Chornock, a member of the ZTF team, in a statement, "but now we can use TDEs to find them.'
Business Mayor
19-05-2025
- Science
- Business Mayor
Not one, but two massive black holes are eating away at this galaxy
Astronomers have discovered nearly 100 examples of massive black holes shredding and devouring stars, almost all of them where you'd expect to find massive black holes: in the star-dense cores of massive galaxies. University of California, Berkeley, astronomers have now discovered the first instance of a massive black hole tearing apart a star thousands of light years from the galaxy's core, which itself contains a massive black hole. The off-center black hole, which has a mass about 1 million times that of the sun, was hiding in the outer regions of the galaxy's central bulge, but revealed itself through bursts of light generated by the spaghettification of the star — a so-called tidal disruption event, or TDE. In a TDE, the immense gravity of a black hole tugs on a star — similar to the way the moon raises ocean tides on Earth, but a lot more violently. 'The classic location where you expect massive black holes to be in a galaxy is in the center, like our Sag A* at the center of the Milky Way,' said Yuhan Yao, a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley who is lead author of a paper about the discovery recently accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters (ApJL) . 'That's where people normally search for tidal disruption events. But this one, it's not at the center. It's actually about 2,600 light years away. That's the first optically discovered off-nuclear TDE discovered.' The galaxy's central massive black hole, about 100 million times the mass of our sun, is also gorging itself, but on gas that has gotten too close to escape. Studies of massive black holes at galactic centers tell astronomers about the evolution of galaxies like our own, which has one central black hole — called SagA* because of its location within the constellation Sagittarius — weighing in at a puny 4 million solar masses. Some of the largest galaxies have central black holes weighing several 100 billion solar masses, presumably the result of the merger of many smaller black holes. Finding two massive black holes in the center of a galaxy is not surprising. Most large galaxies are thought to have massive black holes in their cores, and since galaxies often collide and merge as they move through space, large galaxies should occasionally harbor more than one supermassive black hole — at least until they collide and merge into an even bigger black hole. They typically hide in stealth mode until they reveal their presence by grabbing nearby stars or gas clouds, creating a short-lived burst of light. These are rare events, however. Astronomers calculate that a massive black hole would encounter a star once every 30,000 years, on average. Read More Starwatch: Ursids meteor shower to appear in largely dark sky The new TDE, dubbed AT2024tvd, was detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility, an optical camera mounted on a telescope at Palomar Observatory near San Diego, and confirmed by observations with radio, X-ray and other optical telescopes, including NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. 'Massive black holes are always at the centers of galaxies, but we know that galaxies merge — that is how galaxies grow. And when you have two galaxies that come together and become one, you have multiple black holes,' said co-author Ryan Chornock, a UC Berkeley associate adjunct professor of astronomy. 'Now, what happens? We expect they eventually come together, but theorists have predicted that there should be a population of black holes that are roaming around inside galaxies.' The discovery of one such roaming black hole shows that systematic searches for the signature of a TDE could turn up more rogue black holes. The find also validates plans for a space mission called LISA — the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna — that will look for gravitational waves from mergers of massive black holes like these. 'This is the first time that we actually see massive black holes being so close using TDEs,' said co-author Raffaella Margutti, a UC Berkeley associate professor of astronomy and of physics. 'If these are a couple of supermassive black holes that are getting closer together — which is not necessarily true — but if they are, they might merge and emit gravitational waves that we'll see in the future with LISA.' LISA will complement ground-based gravitational wave detectors, such as LIGO and Virgo, which are sensitive to the merger of black holes or neutron stars weighing less than a few hundred times the mass of our sun, and telescopic studies of pulsar flashes, such as the Nanograv pulsar timing array experiment, which are sensitive to gravitational waves from the mergers of supermassive black holes weighing billions of solar masses. LISA's sweet spot is black holes of several million solar masses. LISA is slated to be launched in the next decade. Transient outbursts Because black holes are invisible, scientists can only find them by detecting the light produced when they shred stars or gas clouds and create a bright, hot, rotating disk of material that gradually falls inward. TDEs are powerful probes of black hole accretion physics, Chornock said, revealing how close material can get to the black hole before being captured and the conditions necessary for black holes to launch powerful jets and winds. The most productive search for TDEs has used data from the Zwicky Transient Facility, originally built to detect supernova explosions, but also sensitive to other flashes in the sky. The ZTF has discovered nearly 100 TDEs since 2018, all within the cores of galaxies. X-ray satellites have also detected a few TDEs, including two in the outskirts of a galaxy that also has a central black hole. In those galaxies, however, the black holes are too far apart to ever merge. The newly discovered black hole is close enough to the core's massive black hole to potentially fall toward it and merge, though not for billions of years. Yao noted that two alternative scenarios could explain the presence of the wandering black hole in AT2024tvd. It could be from the core of a small galaxy that merged with the larger galaxy long ago and is either moving through the larger galaxy on its way out or has become bound to the galaxy in an orbit that may, eventually, bring it close enough to merge with the black hole at the core. Erica Hammerstein, another UC Berkeley postdoctoral researcher, scrutinized the Hubble images as part of the study, but was unable to find evidence of a past galaxy merger. AT2024tvd could also be a former member of a triplet of black holes that used to be at the galactic core. Because of the chaotic nature of three-body orbits, one would have been kicked out of the core to wander around the galaxy. Searching galaxies for off-center black holes Because the ZTF detects hundreds of flashes of light around the northern sky each year, TDE searches to date have focused on flashes discovered near the cores of galaxies, Yao said. She and Chornock created an algorithm to distinguish between the light produced by a supernova and a TDE, and employed it to search through the 10,000 or so detections by ZTF to date to find bursts of light in the galactic center that fit the characteristics of a TDE. 'Supernovae cool down after they peak, and their color becomes redder,' Yao said. 'TDEs remain hot for months or years and have consistently blue colors throughout their evolution.' TDEs also exhibit broad emission lines of hydrogen, helium, carbon, nitrogen and silicon. Last August, the Berkeley team discovered a burp of light that looked like a TDE, but its location seemed off-center, though within the resolution limits of the ZTF. The researchers suspected the black hole was indeed off center, and immediately requested time on several telescopes to pinpoint its location. These included NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Very Large Array and the Hubble Space Telescope. They all confirmed its off-nucleus location, with HST providing a distance of about 2,600 light years — about one-tenth the distance between our sun and Sag A*. Though close to the central black hole, the off-nuclear black hole is not gravitationally bound to it. Because the black hole at the core spews out energy as it accretes infalling gas, it is categorized as an active galactic nucleus. Yao and her team hope to find other roaming TDEs, which will give astronomers an idea of how often galaxies and their core black holes merge, and thus how long it takes to form some of the extreme, supermassive black holes. 'AT2024tvd is the first offset TDE captured by optical sky surveys, and it opens up the entire possibility of uncovering this elusive population of wandering black holes with future sky surveys,' Yao said. 'Right now, theorists haven't given much attention to offset TDEs. They primarily predict rates for TDEs occurring at the centers of galaxies. I think this discovery really motivates them to compute rates for offset TDEs, as well.' The 34 co-authors who contributed to the paper come from institutions in the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden, Russia, Germany, Australia and the Netherlands. ZTF is a public-private partnership, with equal support from the ZTF Partnership and the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Daily Record
15-05-2025
- Science
- Daily Record
NASA finds 'monster' black hole 600 million light-years away in 'scene out of a sci-fi movie'
NASA has pinpointed a massive, roaming black hole that is so big they have dubbed the hole 'Super Jaws' It is easy to get swept away in the wonders of space. There is extensive and ongoing research on space, with scientists having even struck gold recently when trying to reconstruct what happened after the Big Bang. However, NASA has stumbled upon another mind-blowing discovery - a massive roaming black hole lurking 600 million light-years away that is "like a scene out of a sci-fi movie". Astronomers using NASA telescopes have found 'Space Jaws' - a wandering, supermassive black hole. What's more, an accompanying telescope also revealed that the black hole is offset from the centre of the galaxy. "Within the inky black depths between stars, there is an invisible monster gulping down any wayward star that plummets toward it," a NASA spokesperson excitingly elaborated. "The sneaky black hole betrayed its presence in a newly identified tidal disruption event (TDE) where a hapless star was ripped apart and swallowed in a spectacular burst of radiation. "These disruption events are powerful probes of black hole physics, revealing the conditions necessary for launching jets and winds when a black hole is in the midst of consuming a star, and are seen as bright objects by telescopes." A black hole is a region in space where the pulling force of gravity is so strong that light is not able to escape. The strong gravity occurs because matter has been pressed into a tiny space. This compression can take place at the end of a star's life. Some black holes are a result of dying stars. Because no light can escape, black holes are invisible. However, space telescopes with special instruments can help find black holes. They can observe the behaviour of material and stars that are very close to black holes. So, what does this latest find mean? A TDE happens when an infalling star is stretched or 'spaghettified' by a black hole's immense gravitational tidal forces. The shredded stellar remnants are pulled into a circular orbit around the black hole. This generates shocks and outflows with high temperatures that can be seen in ultraviolet and visible light. 'AT2024tvd is the first offset TDE captured by optical sky surveys," said lead study author Yuhan Yao. "It opens up the entire possibility of uncovering this elusive population of wandering black holes with future sky surveys." The full paper will be published in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, but the space agency was surprised to find that this one million-solar-mass black hole doesn't reside exactly in the centre of the host galaxy. This is where supermassive black holes are typically found, and actively gobble up surrounding material. In fact, at the centre of the host galaxy there is a different supermassive black hole weighing 100 million times the mass of the Sun. Hubble's optical precision shows the TDE was only 2,600 light-years from the more massive black hole at the galaxy's centre. That's just one-tenth the distance between our Sun and the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole. Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice. This bigger black hole spews out energy as it accretes infalling gas, and it is categorised as an active galactic nucleus. Strangely, the two supermassive black holes co-exist in the same galaxy, but are not gravitationally bound to each other as a binary pair. The smaller black hole may eventually spiral into the galaxy's centre to merge with the bigger black hole. But for now, it is too far separated to be gravitationally bound. "Theorists haven't given much attention to offset TDEs," Yuhan went on. "But I think this discovery will motivate scientists to look for more examples of this type of event."
Time of India
14-05-2025
- Science
- Time of India
Is Earth in danger? NASA's alarming discovery of a star being consumed by a black hole spark concerns
Astronomers have made a landmark finding in their quest for black holes where a 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 |
Economic Times
13-05-2025
- Science
- Economic Times
Supermassive black hole 'ate' a star, are we next? Here's what NASA found out
A mysterious black hole, 600 million light-years away, has been caught devouring a star in a groundbreaking cosmic event Astronomers have for the first time witnessed a supermassive black hole eat a star 'outside' the core of its host galaxy in a groundbreaking cosmic discovery, challenging long-held beliefs about where these entities reside. The event 'AT2024tvd' was detected 600 million light-years away and marks the first "offset" tidal disruption event (TDE) ever captured by optical sky surveys. Also Read: Human skull on Mars? Spotted initially by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and later confirmed through NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory, the event revealed a star being torn apart by a 'wandering black hole' weighing around 1 million times the mass of the Sun. 'This is the first offset TDE captured by optical sky surveys,' said Yuhan Yao, lead study author and astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley. 'It opens up the entire possibility of uncovering this elusive population of wandering black holes.' The black hole's dramatic meal caused an intense flare, brighter and hotter than a supernova, prompting a wave of follow-up observations. TDEs occur when stars venture too close to black holes and are stretched into strands, a process nicknamed 'spaghettification.' This creates shock waves and releases powerful bursts of energy, which telescopes can detect across the electromagnetic discovery may lead to a new chapter in black hole science. 'Now we can use TDEs to find them,' said Ryan Chornock, a member of the ZTF team. A black hole is a region in space where gravity is so strong that nothing(not even light) can escape from it. It forms when a massive star collapses under its gravity after running out of directly. Since light can't escape them, black holes are invisible. But we can "see" them indirectly by observing how they affect nearby stars, gas, or light, such as glowing disks of material falling in or stars moving strangely near them. Could a black hole come close to Earth? It's extremely unlikely. The nearest known black hole is thousands of light-years away. And even a 'wandering' black hole like the one in the recent discovery is still safely hundreds of millions of light-years from us.
