Black holes both gobble and nibble

• Autores: Jacob Aron
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3014, 2015, pág. 14
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • It's like a buffet where no one agrees on table manners. When a black hole encounters a star, it seems there is more than one way for this cosmic enigma to chow down. Normally, forming the disc and eating it both take years, but Pablo Laguna of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and his colleagues have discovered that some black holes positively race through these stages. The team simulated what happens when a black hole a million times the mass of the sun encounters a sunlike star at close range--so close that they are almost touching. In this situation, the star's orbit twists slightly as it rotates, due to an effect called relativistic precession. Now the black hole can load its plate in an instant, tearing the star apart and spreading it out into a disc in a couple of minutes. "The precession effect helps to spread the debris and wrap it around the black hole," Laguna says. The black hole then takes a few days to swallow the star.