Black hole keeps snacking on white dwarf locked in its orbit
An astronomer thinks he’s spotted a stellar corpse – known as a white dwarf – sending out blazes of light: mayday signals from its uncomfortably close orbit of a black hole. And while such a white dwarf is usually the result of a star naturally running out of fuel and exploding, it’s thought the black hole itself snatched all of a red giant’s free gas away, triggering the premature death. Such is the peril of treading too close to a black hole, even if it can’t gobble you up.
“In my interpretation of the X-ray data, the white dwarf survived, but it did not escape,” Andrew King, an astrophysicist at the University of Leicester in the UK, explained. “It is now caught in an elliptical orbit around the black hole, making one trip around about once every nine hours.”
King’s new research is based on observations gathered by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray telescope. The pair focused on drama unfolding in a galaxy called GSN 069, located about 250 million light years away from Earth.
Every nine hours or so the galaxy experiences a spike in X-ray emissions. By analysing those spikes, King came up with his theory of a so-called nearmiss tidal disruption event. Scientists have studied plenty of tidal disruption events, in which a black hole tears apart a star that comes too close.
When a wayward red giant first snuck too close, the black hole snatched away all its hydrogen, leaving just the core white dwarf behind. But the black hole, which contains about 400,000 times the mass of the Sun – a bit puny for a supermassive black hole – couldn’t finish the job. Instead it trapped the white dwarf in a nine-hour dramatically elongated orbit, and at the closest point of each loop the black hole again sucks up a bit more of the star’s matter, munching away at its meal.