An Awakened Black Hole Devoured a Star. What Was Hiding in the Cosmic Dust?

Why Was It So Hard to Detect a Black Hole Devouring a Star?

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been operating for more than three years and continues to deliver fascinating new information about how the universe works. Its latest achievement is registering a phenomenon that has been difficult for scientists to observe until now: a dormant black hole devours a star while hidden in a cloud of cosmic dust.

A dormant black hole is quite difficult to notice. In fact, you can only observe it when a star stands in its way. Then, the black hole begins to absorb it. Its immense gravity stretches the star into a disk that circles the black hole. The star then emits radiation that ground-based instruments can detect. This allows us to study and better understand dormant black holes.

These objects very often hide behind clouds of cosmic dust and gas. These clouds effectively block X-ray and ultraviolet waves, which we use to detect such events in space. According to research from MIT scientists, for every black hole devours a star that we detect, there’s another one we’ll never discover. Or at least, that was the case until recently.

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Cosmic Clouds of Dust and Gas: Hiding and Revealing

The key turned out to be waves once again, but this time not those emitted by the star-eating black hole. The cloud of gas obscuring our view also radiates. The cosmic dust emits infrared radiation, which could be the result of earlier absorption of X-ray and ultraviolet waves coming from the black hole as it was swallowing the star.

To confirm this hypothesis, MIT researchers pointed the James Webb Telescope toward the infrared-emitting gas clouds. The JWST detects a broader range of red radiation than earlier devices that have studied similar locations. After receiving the results, the scientists had no doubt. The cosmic clouds of gas and dust hide black holes that are swallowing stars as they are stretched by the event horizon.

12 Dormant Black Holes Detected: What Else Will the Webb Telescope See?

In an article published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters (Vol. 988, No. 2), the MIT researchers emphasized that the infrared waves the Webb telescope recorded are also characteristic of non-dormant black holes that are constantly feeding on their dense surroundings. However, a more detailed analysis of the gas cloud movement confirmed their initial hypothesis. They were observing dust circulating around a dormant black hole that had just woken up to swallow a nearby star.

Scientists have already recorded 12 of these phenomena hidden behind cosmic gas clouds. Unfortunately, we can’t observe a black hole devours a star in “real-time.” This is partly due to the immense distances in space, which cause the waves to reach us with a delay of sometimes billions of years. Additionally, it takes several months for the radiation emitted by the black hole during its “meal” to affect the gas clouds that we can observe with the JWST. Therefore, astronomers detect them relatively later than other cosmic phenomena not obscured by cosmic dust.

Read the original article: Przebudzona czarna dziura pożarła gwiazdę. Co skrywa kosmiczny pył?