By Reuters
WASHINGTON: Astronomers have observed the calamitous result of a star that picked the wrong dance partner.
They have documented what appears to be a new type of supernova, as stellar explosions are known, that occurred when a massive star tried to swallow a black hole with which it had engaged in a lengthy pas de deux.
The star, which was at least 10 times as massive as our sun, and the black hole, which had a similar mass, were gravitationally bound to one another in what is called a binary system.
But as the distance separating them gradually narrowed, the black hole鈥檚 immense gravitational pull appears to have distorted the star – stretching it out from its spherical shape – and siphoned off material before causing it to explode.
鈥淲e caught a massive star locked in a fatal tango with a black hole,鈥 said astrophysicist Alexander Gagliano of the US National Science Foundation鈥檚 Institute for AI and Fundamental Interactions located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lead author of the study