Scientists have discovered what appears to be a rare cosmic event where a black hole has consumed a star from inside out, resulting in a massive supernova.
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According to the study published in Science, astronomers believe that the black hole was first swallowed by the gargantuan star, however, soon after it began to disrupt and collapse the core of the star, eating it inside out and resulting in the start to meet its demise in a beautiful supernova.?
The cosmic event was first spotted by researchers four years ago in 2017 when the Very Large (VLA) telescope in New Mexico picked up a rather overwhelming burst of radio energy coming from the supernova.?
Researcher and astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, Dillion Dong, decided to further analyse this anomaly with his team and eventually discovered that the black hole and the star were essentially binary stars -- basically two stars that orbit each other.?
However, one star eventually collapsed into a black hole, but still, two remained in orbit, until the black hole entered the star’s atmosphere around 300 years ago and started consuming it.?
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To a layman this occurrence might not seem as odd but this cosmic event could actually be evidence for a long theorised cosmic occurrence dubbed ‘merger-triggered supernova’ -- a phenomenon when a star goes supernova after merging with a neutron star or black hole.?
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Dong said in a statement to SciTechDaily, “We had ideas of what we might find in the VLA survey, but we were open to the possibility of finding things we didn’t expect. We created the conditions to discover something interesting by conducting loosely constrained, open-minded searches of large data sets and then taking into account all of the contextual clues we could assemble about the objects that we found. During this process you find yourself pulled in different directions by different explanations, and you simply let nature tell you what’s out there.”
The fact that the universe is still largely a mystery we are unravelling, thanks to this new kind of supernova formed by a black hole eating a star, is cause for scientific excitement. What do you think of this new supernova? Let us know in comments below, and keep following Indiatimes.com for latest science, space and technology news and insights.