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科学家拍到黑洞撕裂恒星瞬间简直震撼

2020-10-14 22:26:54来源：今日头条编辑：毛青青

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　　原标题：科学家拍到黑洞撕裂恒星瞬间简直震撼

　　Telescopes have captured the rare light flash from a dying star as it was ripped apart by a supermassive black hole.

　　This rarely seen "tidal disruption event" — which creates spaghettification in stars as they stretch and stretch – is the closest such known event to happen, at only 215 million light-years from Earth. (For comparison, the nearest star system to Earth – Alpha Centauri — is roughly 4 light-years away, and the Milky Way is roughly 200,000 light years in diameter.) One light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).

　　"The idea of a black hole 'sucking in' a nearby star sounds like science fiction. But this is exactly what happens in a tidal disruption event," the new study's lead author Matt Nicholl, a lecturer and Royal Astronomical Society research fellow at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, said in a European Southern Observatory statement. Researchers caught the event in action using numerous telescopes, including ESO's Very Large Telescope and New Technology Telescope.

　　"When an unlucky star wanders too close to a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy, the extreme gravitational pull of the black hole shreds the star into thin streams of material," co-author Thomas Wevers said in the same statement. Wevers is an ESO Fellow in Santiago, Chile and was at the Institute of Astronomy at the United Kingdom's University of Cambridge when he did the work.

　　It has been difficult to see these events in the past because the black hole eating up the star has a tendency to shoot out material from the dying star, such as dust, that obscures the view, ESO officials said. Luckily, the newly studied event was studied shortly after the star ripped to shreds‘

　　Researchers studied the event, known as AT 2019qiz, over six months as the flare became bright and then faded away. Observations took place in ultraviolet, optical, X-ray and radio wavelengths. Looking at the event in this comprehensive way showed how the material leaves the star and the flare the star sends as its dying gasp, researchers said.

　　The team also estimated the size of the doomed star at about the same mass as our own sun. It didn't have a chance against the black hole, which has a mass of more than 1 million times that of the sun.

　　AT 2019qiz also acts as a bellwether for learning about how matter behaves in the extreme environment around supermassive black holes, the team said. A study based on the research was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

　　望远镜捕捉到了一颗垂死恒星被超大质量黑洞撕裂时发出的罕见的闪光。

　　这一罕见的“ 潮汐力瓦解事件”在恒星伸展时产生空间碎片化，是目前已知的距离地球只有2.15亿光年的事件。（相比之下，距离地球最近的恒星系统——半人马座阿尔法星大约距离地球4光年，银河系直径约20万光年。）一光年是光在一年中传播的距离，大约6万亿英里（10万亿公里）。

　　“黑洞‘吸食’附近恒星的想法听起来像科幻小说。这项新研究的主要作者、英国伯明翰大学（University of Birmingham）讲师、皇家天文学会研究员马特·尼科尔（Matt Nicholl）在欧洲南方天文台的一份声明中说。研究人员用许多望远镜捕捉到了这一事件，包括ESO的超大望远镜和新技术望远镜。

　　合著者托马斯·韦弗斯（Thomas Wevers）在同一份声明中说：“当一颗不幸的恒星过于靠近星系中心的超大质量黑洞时，黑洞的极端引力会将恒星粉碎成稀薄的物质流。”。韦弗斯是智利圣地亚哥的ESO研究员，当时他在英国剑桥大学天文学研究所工作。

　　ESO官员说，在过去很难看到这些事件，因为吞噬恒星的黑洞有一种从垂死恒星喷出物质（如尘埃）的倾向，这会模糊视线。幸运的是，星体在被撕成碎片后就被研究。

　　研究人员对这一事件进行了为期6个月的研究，称为2019qiz，因为耀斑变得明亮，然后逐渐消失。观测是在紫外线、光学、X射线和射电波段进行的。研究人员说，以这种综合的方式观察这一事件，可以看出物质是如何离开恒星的，以及恒星在奄奄一息时发出的耀斑。

　　研究小组还估计了这颗命中注定的恒星的大小和我们太阳的质量差不多。它没有机会对抗黑洞，因为黑洞的质量是太阳的100万倍。

　　研究小组说，在2019年，QIZ还充当了研究物质在超大质量黑洞周围极端环境中的行为的领头羊。一项基于这项研究的研究发表在《皇家天文学会月刊》上。