Russian orbiting observatory Spektr-RG captures how a black hole begins to destroy a star

In just a couple of years of work in orbit, the Spektr-RG orbital X-ray observatory has already made a large number of unusual discoveries, but the extreme discovery, even against their background, is striking is different.

So placed on board "Spectra-RG" telescope eROSITA recorded the earliest stage of the breaking of a star by the tidal forces of a black hole. And literally 6 months ago, the analysis of this area of ​​the starry sky did not show any activity.

New unique discovery

In most cases, stars are or are completely absorbed by massive black holes without any visual manifestations (for excluding a powerful energy release), or the processes of tidal destruction of stars are recorded already at the final stages of this process.

But literally less than a month ago, working eROSITA fixed x-ray source SRGe J131014.2 + 444315 with the softest spectrum. And according to the co-author of the discovery P. Medvedeva (employee of the Department of High Energy Astrophysics of IKI RAS), the analyzes of the collected data from this area over the past

Thus, the analysis of the collected data made it possible to make the assumption that the recorded phenomenon is probably associated with the so-called tidal destruction of a star in a distant galaxy.

Moreover, this process was recorded almost a few months after the start of this process. The publication of this conclusion almost immediately attracted the attention of scientists from all over the world.

And thanks to the work of the ten-meter Keck telescope (Hawaii), the statement was confirmed that the event in question is associated precisely with the early stage of the tidal destruction of the star. And the event is far from Our solar system with you, no less than 2.5 billion light years.

And the data collected from the American system for the early detection of asteroid activity threatening the Earth, ATLAS showed that the detected X-ray radiation from the object under study was recorded about two weeks before the radiation was detected already in the visible spectrum.

And it turns out that before the gaze of astronomers, for the first time in the entire history of observations, the process of absorption of a star by a black hole unfolds from the very first episodes.

And as scientists suggest, the matter from the ruptured star has formed an accretion disk and is now slowly being absorbed by the black hole. And scientists managed to fix a previously unknown brightest and at the same time soft X-ray source thanks to the work of the Russian orbital observatory "Spectrum-RG".

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