Astronomers have observed the calamitous result of a star that picked the wrong dance partner. They have documented what appears to be a new type of supernova, as stellar explosions are known, that occurred when a massive star tried to swallow a black hole with which it had engaged in a lengthy pas de deux.
The star, which was at least 10 times as massive as our sun, and the black hole, which had a similar mass, were gravitationally bound to one another in what is called a binary system. But as the distance separating them gradually narrowed, the black hole’s immense gravitational pull appears to have distorted the star – stretching it out from its spherical shape – and siphoned off material before causing it to explode.
“We caught a massive star locked in a fatal tango with a black hole,” said astrophysicist Alexander Gagliano of the US National Science Foundation’s Institute for AI and Fundamental Interactions located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a co-author of the study published this week in the Astrophysical Journal.
“After shedding mass for years in a death spiral with the black hole, the massive star met its finale by exploding. It released more energy in a second than the sun has across its entire lifetime,” Gagliano added.
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