{"id":223259,"date":"2025-12-09T07:22:16","date_gmt":"2025-12-09T07:22:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/223259\/"},"modified":"2025-12-09T07:22:16","modified_gmt":"2025-12-09T07:22:16","slug":"watch-a-black-hole-fall-into-a-star-and-then-blow-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/223259\/","title":{"rendered":"Watch a black hole fall into a star and then blow up"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe were all still working on Independence Day and writing proposals and trying to point all the telescopes we could at this part of the sky to really understand what was going on,\u201d says Brendan O\u2019Connor<\/a>, astronomer at Carnegie Mellon University, who led another study on the event<\/a> also in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.<\/p>\n

Initially, scientists thought the gamma ray signals could have come from inside the Milky Way, which would be simpler to explain. \u201cIf it’s within our own galaxy, it doesn’t have to be anywhere near as powerful as if it’s in a very distant galaxy\u201d because the brightness could be explained by a more run-of-the-mill cosmic event that\u2019s relatively close by, says Andrew Levan<\/a>, an astrophysicist at Radboud University in the Netherlands.<\/p>\n

Follow-up observations quickly debunked that theory. Once NASA\u2019s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory pinpointed where on the sky the event had taken place, the European Southern Observatory\u2019s Very Large Telescope in Chile found the fading afterglow next to a smudge the sky, and NASA\u2019s Hubble Space Telescope showed that smudge to be a previously unknown galaxy. Then the James Webb Space Telescope, which penetrates through thick cosmic dust using its infrared vision, helped the scientist-detective team figure out that light from the crime scene has been traveling toward us for 8 billion years.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was even brighter and more brilliant than you\u2019d have thought, because it was hidden behind so much dust in the galaxy,\u201d Levan says.<\/p>\n

\"Against<\/p>\n

NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope gave astronomers their clearest view of GRB 250702B\u2019s home, a large, extremely dusty galaxy around eight billion light-years away from Earth. In the zoomed inset, the burst\u2019s position (indicated with tick\u00a0marks) near the top edge of the galaxy\u2019s dark dust lane eliminates the possibility that the burst was associated with the supermassive black hole at the galaxy\u2019s core.<\/p>\n

NASA\/ESA\/CSA\/H. Sears, Rutgers. Image Processing: A. Pagan, STScI<\/p>\n

Scientists tracking this saga agree that the destruction of the star must have created a jet of particles shooting out of the crime scene at nearly the speed of light, which generated the gamma rays. The big mystery, says Levan, becomes: \u201cWhat is it that makes that jet happen in the first place? What’s sitting in the middle there and actually powering that jet?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWe were all still working on Independence Day and writing proposals and trying to point all the telescopes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":223260,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[270],"tags":[582,1025,3514,18,77070,78499,120212,19,120211,17,133,451,11186,120210,1017,3517,33199,101366],"class_list":{"0":"post-223259","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-astronomy","9":"tag-astrophysics","10":"tag-black-hole","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-gamma-rays","13":"tag-gamma-ray-burst","14":"tag-grb-250702b","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-intermediate-mass-black-holes","17":"tag-ireland","18":"tag-science","19":"tag-space","20":"tag-star","21":"tag-stellar-mass-black-holes","22":"tag-supermassive-black-holes","23":"tag-supernova","24":"tag-telescope","25":"tag-x-rays"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115688410377763368","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223259\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}