Comments
fungussa t1_is19lof wrote
Isn't a black hole only able to emit Hawking radiation and not able to eject matter?
EDIT: I've just seen this comment, by the paper's lead author:
> What we think happened is this material was in an accretion disc surrounding the black hole after it was unbound. In 20% of cases you then see a radio outflow at the part where it’s torn apart, but in this case we have really good radio limits that this didn’t happen then (ie, didn’t see anything). Then after ~750 days for whatever reason this outflow began…
Oodles_of_Questions t1_is1dhul wrote
Ooo, that's a really good point. I hope someone can answer this!
Chimpbot t1_is1dx79 wrote
As with anything else, these rules are only rules until we find out that they may be incorrect.
Right now, we might have an example of a puking black hole.
The_Wanderer25 t1_is1ft8v wrote
It's just a cosmic burp, totally fine, totally normal.
Joaaayknows t1_is1gqwi wrote
His statement implies black holes can get full which is quite funny but also very interesting.
Do we have any information of what the composition of the expelled matter was?
Like, is it star bits stripped down to molecules or a jumble of different gasses entirely which I would describe as, sticking with this analogy, ‘throwing up’?
FuturologyBot t1_is1llcd wrote
The following submission statement was provided by /u/mossadnik:
Submission Statement:
>In October 2018, a small star was ripped to shreds when it wandered too close to a black hole in a galaxy located 665 million light years away from Earth. Though it may sound thrilling, the event did not come as a surprise to astronomers who occasionally witness these violent incidents while scanning the night sky.
>But nearly three years after the massacre, the same black hole is lighting up the skies again — and it hasn’t swallowed anything new, scientists say.
>“This caught us completely by surprise — no one has ever seen anything like this before,” says Yvette Cendes, a research associate at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and lead author of a new study analyzing the phenomenon.
>The team concludes that the black hole is now ejecting material traveling at half of the speed of light, but are unsure why the outflow was delayed by several years. The results, described this week in the Astrophysical Journal, may help scientists better understand black holes’ feeding behavior, which Cendes likens to “burping” after a meal.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/y26hnm/weve_never_seen_anything_like_this_before_black/is13a05/
TheCommodore44 t1_is1un5s wrote
Ah they can burp now, so they are eldritch horrors feasting on the lifeblood of existence after all. Thanks for confirming my nightmares.
piTehT_tsuJ t1_is28el8 wrote
So it had a really rough Tuesday night and the Taco Bell isn't sitting right, I can relate...
James-VanderGeek t1_is2ggtp wrote
Novice here: how is anything able to escape the event horizon of the black hole?
cybercuzco t1_is2kpvi wrote
The exit velocity is .5c but I wonder how close to c this material got. We could be seeing time dilation effects. Presumably as it comes out of the gravity well its going to slow down, so if they see it going half the speed of light now, it must have been going really close to the speed of light at closest approach
LiveMasTacoBell t1_is2uu0q wrote
How dare you!
Rude_Commercial_7470 t1_is2uw8l wrote
Its not thats why its surprising. Typical burps are when so much goes in at once it doesn’t all fit and some gets ejected.
Mandalwhoreian t1_is38r85 wrote
Years for us. But the blink of an eye, on a cosmic scale.
jedrt-theloser t1_is3lgvc wrote
Could the ejection be caused by a rotating black hole?
cybercuzco t1_is3m04a wrote
All black holes rotate, you would have to create one artificially to get it to be non-rotational
GrandWazoo0 t1_is4il04 wrote
Didn’t this star get ripped to shreds 665 million years ago, not in October 2018?
Artificial_Chris t1_is4nwji wrote
Yes, technically. But the "Burp" happened 665 million years ago too in that case.
GlobalEvening4931 t1_is4porv wrote
As that’s an artists impression, we need to look at the way we see black holes.
That could be the result of a collision of something on the far side of the black hole. Nothing to suggest it came out of the hole itself surely.
As our pictures of black holes contain as much lights from the obscured far side as they do from the nearside, we can’t really judge what happened.
And at over 600m light years? It’s all a bit fuzzy.
Viper_63 t1_is6biwo wrote
>In October 2018, a small star was ripped to shreds when it wandered too close to a black hole in a galaxy located 665 million light years away from Earth. Though it may sound thrilling, the event did not come as a surprise to astronomers who occasionally witness these violent incidents while scanning the night sky.
No, it wasn't "ripped to shreds in October 2018". That's not how speed of light works. You can not witness something 665 million light years away in the instant it happens.
DisasterDalek t1_is71bcr wrote
To witness a star being sucked into a black hole must be the most wild thing in the universe...and terrifying
Bensemus t1_is7p895 wrote
Not really. Our reality is our reference frame. To us this event just happened. To the black hole you won't be born for 665 million years yet here you are.
There is no absolute reference frame.
Bensemus t1_is7pj46 wrote
That's exactly how it works. To use the star was just recently consumed. This is our reality and it is 100% true. To the black hole and the star this happened 665 million years ago while you won't be born and therefore won't exist for 665 million years. It's not that the black hole isn't aware of you. Do do not exist in the black hole's reference frame.
Viper_63 t1_is851ga wrote
>That's exactly how it works. To use the star was just recently consumed. This is our reality and it is 100% true.
No it's not. We know that what we are observing happened hundreds of millions of years ago and not recently. Hence this event did not happen in October 2018 - we know it didn't, because w eknow that the speed of light remains constant over galactic and intergalactic distances. That we are observing the event just now has no bearing over when it originally happened.
>It's not that the black hole isn't aware of you.
I am reasonably certain that a black hole isn't aware of anything, regardless of reference frame, and that both we and the black hole can indeed exist in the same referance frame.
mossadnik OP t1_is13a05 wrote
Submission Statement:
>In October 2018, a small star was ripped to shreds when it wandered too close to a black hole in a galaxy located 665 million light years away from Earth. Though it may sound thrilling, the event did not come as a surprise to astronomers who occasionally witness these violent incidents while scanning the night sky.
>But nearly three years after the massacre, the same black hole is lighting up the skies again — and it hasn’t swallowed anything new, scientists say.
>“This caught us completely by surprise — no one has ever seen anything like this before,” says Yvette Cendes, a research associate at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and lead author of a new study analyzing the phenomenon.
>The team concludes that the black hole is now ejecting material traveling at half of the speed of light, but are unsure why the outflow was delayed by several years. The results, described this week in the Astrophysical Journal, may help scientists better understand black holes’ feeding behavior, which Cendes likens to “burping” after a meal.