What happens if you throw a star at a black hole? Things get messy (video)

[Admin]

Supermassive black holes that shred and devour stars throw them up like a "bad curry" and cover themselves in the wreckage, sick new simulations reveal.

What happens if you throw a star at a black hole? Things get messy (video) : Read more

 

[Torbjorn Larsson]

A more technical description from the paper:

That our outflowing envelope, or “black hole Sun,” isoptically thick is demonstrated by our estimated photondiffusion timescales of ∼10–100 days shown in the bottompanel of Figure 3. This means that the debris produced by the disruption cannot cool efficiently, leading to the formationof a photosphere.

It is by the way a lot of ongoing research on black hole matter consumption. A new paper thinks we may be able to see gravitational waves from collapsars:

The gravitational waves emerge following the violent deaths of rapidly rotating stars 15 to 20 times the mass of the sun. Upon running out of fuel, these stars implode, then explode, in an event known as a collapsar. This leaves behind a black hole surrounded by a large disk of leftover material that quickly whirls into the black hole's maw. The spiraling of material—which lasts just minutes—is so great that it distorts the space around it, creating gravitational waves that travel across the universe.

The new simulations showed that the rotating disks around collapsars can also emit gravitational waves that amplify together, very much like the orbiting compact objects in mergers.

"I thought that the signal would be much messier because the disk is a continuous distribution of gas with material spinning in different orbits," Gottlieb says. "We found that the gravitational waves from these disks are emitted coherently, and they're also rather strong."

Not only is the predicted signal from collapsar disks strong enough to be detected by LIGO, but Gottlieb's calculations suggest that a few events might already be in existing datasets. Proposed gravitational wave detectors such as the Cosmic Explorer and Einstein Telescope could spot dozens a year.

https://phys.org/news/2024-08-astrophysical-simulations-gravitational-source-collapsing.html