Record Breaking BH Feeding Frenzy!:

Discussion in 'Astronomy, Exobiology, & Cosmology' started by paddoboy, Feb 6, 2017.

  1. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Researchers discover a black hole feeding frenzy that breaks records
    February 6, 2017

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    Artist illustration depicting the record breaking “tidal disruption event” (TDE). The red shows hotter material that falls toward the black hole and generates a distinct X-ray flare. The blue shows a wind blowing from the infalling material. Credit: CXC/M. Weiss; X-ray: NASA/CXC/UNH/D. Lin et al, Optical: CFHT
    A giant black hole ripped apart a nearby star and then continued to feed off its remains for close to a decade, according to research led by the University of New Hampshire. This black hole meal is more than 10 times longer than any other previous episode of a star's death.



    Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-02-black-hole-frenzy.html#jCp
     
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  3. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.00792.pdf

    A likely decade-long sustained tidal disruption event:

    Multiwavelength flares from tidal disruption and accretion of stars can be used to find and study otherwise dormant massive black holes in galactic nuclei1 . Previous well-monitored candidate flares are short-lived, with most emission confined to within ∼1 year2–5 . Here we report the discovery of a well observed super-long (>11 years) luminous soft X-ray flare from the nuclear region of a dwarf starburst galaxy. After an apparently fast rise within ∼4 months a decade ago, the X-ray luminosity, though showing a weak trend of decay, has been persistently high at around the Eddington limit (when the radiation pressure balances the gravitational force). The X-ray spectra are generally soft (steeply declining towards higher energies) and can be described with Comptonized emission from an optically thick low-temperature corona, a super-Eddington accretion signature often observed in accreting stellar-mass black holes6 . Dramatic spectral softening was also caught in one recent observation, implying either a temporary transition from the super-Eddington accretion state to the standard thermal state or the presence of a transient highly blueshifted (∼ 0.36c) warm absorber. All these properties in concert suggest a tidal disruption event (TDE) of an unusually long super-Eddington accretion phase that has never been observed before.
     
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  5. RajeshTrivedi Valued Senior Member

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    I like these illustrations, so colorful, so artistic. Who designs these illustrations? A physicist guiding an artist? or a physicist cum artist? or there are easy software available?
     
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  7. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Glad it pleases you.

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    The point is of course, that knowing the very nature of BH's, all we are able to do is draw reasonable representations of them.
    The far more pleasing aspect as I'm sure you will appreciate, is that finally they have been confirmed along with gravitational waves, with the two aLIGO experiments.
    Shouldn't be too long before we hear of more according to most sources.
    I will keep you up to date.

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