Black holes are voracious eaters. They devour pretty much anything that strays too close. They’re not fussy; dust, gas, plasma, Higgs bosons, planets, stars, even photons are on the menu. However, for astronomers, interesting things can be observed if a star starts to be cannibalized by a neighbouring black hole. Should a star be unlucky enough to have a black hole as its binary partner, the black hole will begin to strip the stars upper layers, slowly consuming it on each agonizing orbit. Much like water spiralling down a plug hole, the tortured plasma from the star is gravitationally dragged on a spiral path toward the black hole’s event horizon. As stellar matter falls down the event horizon plug hole, it reaches relativistic velocities, blasting a huge amount of radiation into space. And now, astronomers have taken different observations from two observatories to see how the visible emissions correlate with the X-ray emissions from two known black hole sources. What they discovered came as a surprise…
Continue reading “Probing Variable Black Holes”
astroengine.com 