Astronomers have developed groundbreaking simulations that depict a star being consumed by a supermassive black hole, offering the most detailed models yet of a tidal disruption event. Supermassive black holes, found at the centers of galaxies, occasionally engulf nearby stars. During this process, known as a tidal disruption event, the star is stretched into a thin, spaghetti-like strand—a phenomenon aptly named “spaghettification”—before being torn apart. In a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomers presented these first-of-their-kind simulations, which trace the consumption of a star by a black hole over the span of a year, reports ScienceAlert. The concept of tidal disruption events was first theorized in the 1980s. According to this theory, when a star is torn apart, approximately half of its material should form a rotating disk of luminous matter around the black hole, known as an accretion disk. This disk was expected to reach temperatures so high that it would emit large amounts of X-ray radiation. However, astronomers were later surprised to discover that during these events, the disks predominantly emit optical light rather than X-rays. Furthermore, the temperature of the infalling matter was only around 10,000 degrees Celsius—significantly lower than the millions of degrees anticipated from the gas surrounding a supermassive black hole. Another unexpected finding was the enormous size of the luminous matter surrounding the black hole, which is several times larger than our Solar System and rapidly expands away from the black hole at a fraction of the speed of light. Given that even a supermassive black hole, with a mass one million times that of the Sun, is only slightly larger than our star, the sheer scale of the luminous material observed was astonishing to astronomers. Astrophysicists have hypothesized that matter crushed during a tidal disruption event might explain the lack of X-ray emissions. But until now, there was no clear understanding of how this process unfolds. The new study reveals that when a supermassive black hole pulls in a star, gravitational forces cause the star to undergo spaghettification, stretching it into a long, thin thread. While half of the star’s material ends up near the black hole, only about 1% is actually absorbed. The remaining material is expelled into space. The study’s authors note that simulating a tidal disruption event is challenging. Newton’s laws of gravity break down near a supermassive black hole, requiring the application of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. These new simulations accurately depict the entire process, from the onset of the event to the expulsion of matter that the black hole cannot absorb. The simulations also confirm that the compression of the black hole by infalling matter does indeed occur. They show that tidal disruption events resemble a star the size of a solar system, expanding at a few percent of the speed of light, with a supermassive black hole at its core. The post New Simulations Reveal How Supermassive Black Holes Devour Stars appeared first on Anomalien.com.