Ummm, does anyone know the Heimlich?
There's a black hole that needs a good whack on the back. You see, the black hole is choking on Dougie.
OK, we'll explain...
Astronomers believed they captured a black hole tearing apart a star on a tiny telescope at McDonald Observatory, according to a press release by the observatory, but what they actually saw was a black hole swallowing - rather, choking down - a former Sun-star. The results of the five-year study and compilation of data from various ground and space telescopes is published in The Astrophysical Journal, according to the press release.
The ROTSE IIIb telescope at McDonald caught a bright event on Jan. 21, 2009, while performing nightly sweeps as part of the ROTSE Supernova Verification Project (RSVP). The flash was as bright as the brightest "superluminous supernovae," according to the press release. The event was called ROTSE3J120847.9+430121, but friends call it "Dougie," after a character in South Park.
Sloan Digital Sky Survey set about to look for Dougie's host galaxy and saw a faint red galaxy near Dougie. A giant Keck telescope in Hawaii was able to determine that Dougie's home was three billion light-years away, according to the press release.
So, was Dougie a "a superluminous supernova; a merger of two neutron stars; a gamma-ray burst; or a 'tidal disruption event' - a star being pulled apart as it neared its host galaxy's central black hole," wondered astronomers.
Dougie was examined by the ultraviolet orbiting Swift telescope, from the ground with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald, with computers and finally scientists narrowed it down. Dougie didn't look like a supernova. He didn't look like a neutron star merger or a gamma-ray burst either.
"When we discovered this new object, it looked similar to supernovae we had known already," said lead author Jozsef Vinko of the University of Szeged in Hungary. "But when we kept monitoring its light variation, we realized that this was something nobody really saw before. Finding out that it was probably a supermassive black hole eating a star was a fascinating experience."
"We got the idea that it might be a 'tidal disruption event,'" J. Craig Wheeler, leader of the supernova group at The University of Texas at Austin, said. "A star wanders near a black hole, the star's side nearer the black hole is pulled ... These especially large tides can be strong enough that you pull the star out into a noodle."
The star "doesn't fall directly into the black hole," Wheeler said, according to the press release. "It might form a disk first, but the black hole is destined to swallow most of that material."
Scientists have witness black hole gulping stars, but only a handful of times, but this time was special for another reason: Dougie wasn't going down without a fight.
James Guillochon of Harvard and Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz at the University of California, Santa Cruz, created models that demonstrated how the stellar matter caused so much radiation that it pushed back on the matter tumbling in, according to the press release. The black hole was choking.
Based on the characteristics of the light from Dougie, and their logic about the star's original mass, Dougie was then classified as a (former) Sun-star and the black hole (only the mass of a million Suns) was deemed "rather modest," by Wheeler and his team.
Wheeler ruminated, "Who knew this little guy had a black hole?"
