NPR reports that astronomers have spotted a black hole finally “burping” out energy from a star that it swallowed back in 2018:

How unusual is this? “Super unusual,” Yvette Cendes, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian and lead author of the paper, tells NPR. “We’ve never really seen this before to this degree.”

Researchers made the discovery when they used a powerful radio telescope facility — the Very Large Array in New Mexico — to check in on some two dozen black holes where stars had been shredded after coming too close to them. That is, the material in the star was pulled apart, or “spaghettified.” Such happenings are called tidal disruption events, or TDEs….

“There’s a point when you get too close to a black hole that you can no longer escape the black hole — that’s called the event horizon. But this material never crossed that boundary, according to our best estimates,” Cendes explains. In other words, the star got close enough to the black hole to get shredded — but not to fall into that point of no return.

But that’s not what’s unusual about it. Mashable picks up the story, noting it’s a black hole, at the center of a galaxy some 665 million light-years from Earth:

It’s the fact that this star apparently didn’t sit well with the black hole for such a long time that surprised them. Researchers have been studying these events with radio telescopes for more than a decade, said Edo Berger, a Harvard astronomy professor and co-author. “There was radio silence for the first three years in this case,” Berger said in a statement.

“And now it’s dramatically lit up to become one of the most radio luminous … ever observed.”

The discovery suggests that delayed outflows of light from a black hole after swallowing a cosmic object could be happening more often than thought.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Scientists Baffled After a Black Hole ‘Burps’ a Star’s Energy – Three Years Later