A black hole expels the star that swallowed it years ago

In October 2018, astronomers observed the disintegration of a young star as it came very close to a black hole in a galaxy 665 million light-years from Earth. Of course, this wasn’t the first time astronomers saw a black hole swallowing a star, but what followed was unexpected.

Roughly three years later, the same black hole produced light, without swallowing anything new.

This surprised us! Nobody’s ever seen anything like this before. – Yvette Sindis, Center for Astrophysics, Harvard

The team of astronomers concluded that the black hole was spewing material out of the star that swallowed it at half the speed of light, but what worries them is that it does so years later. Data from the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in New Mexico showed that the black hole was mysteriously active in June 2021.

We’ve applied the personal manager’s time to many telescopes, something you do when you find something unexpected that you can’t wait in the telescope proposal queue to study. All our suggestions were immediately accepted.

Using telescopes from around the world, they confirmed their findings.

We’ve been monitoring gravitational perturbation events (TDEs) with radio telescopes for a decade now and sometimes find them glowing in the radio spectrum as they spit out material as a black hole swallows a star. We observed AT2018hyz in the visible spectrum for several months until it lost its brightness and then let go. After three years of quiet activity, it’s now suddenly brightening to become one of the brightest TDEs we’ve ever observed.

Even the speed of the ejected material is extraordinary. TDEs reach 10% of the speed of light and here we have 50%.

It’s the first time we’ve observed such a long delay between the star’s absorption and the ejection of matter. The next step is to explore whether this occurs more regularly and we simply do not observe TDEs long enough in their development.

The search was published in Astrophysical Journal.

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