Yahoo News Huge black hole is spotted 'eating' from galaxy to grow bigger
Scientists have unravelled one of the secrets ofthe vast supermassive black holes, millions of times the weight of our sun, which lie at the heart of galaxies including our own Milky Way.
Scientists have worked out one of the ways in which the monstrous objects grow – by suddenly devouring gas from their surroundings.
In February 2017, the All Sky Automated Survey spotted the radiation around a black hole growing 50 times brighter.
Researchers from Tel Aviv University believe that the black hole was captured ‘swallowing’ gas from its parent galaxy – different from so-called ‘tidal disruption’ events where black holes swallow stars.
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Dr. Benny Trakhtenbrot said, ‘The sudden brightening of AT 2017bgt was reminiscent of a tidal disruption event.
‘But we quickly realized that this time there was something unusual. The first clue was an additional component of light, which had never been seen in tidal disruption events.”
‘We followed this event for more than a year with telescopes on Earth and in space, and what we saw did not match anything we had seen before.’
Prof. Hagai Netzer of Tel Aviv University said, ‘We had predicted back in the 1980s that a black hole swallowing gas from its surroundings could produce the elements of light seen here. This new result is the first time the process was seen in practice.’
