Black Hole Mystery Solved? | Science & Technology | Scientists Have Solved a Major Black Hole Mystery

 Black Hole Mystery Solved? | Science & Technology | Scientists Have Solved a Major Black Hole Mystery

Prof Waqar Hussain

A study discussed this / Photo courtesy: Science Communication Lab

You may have heard or read quite a bit about black holes, but much about this cosmic enigma remains unknown. However, scientists now claim to have solved a major black hole puzzle.

A new study claims to have unraveled the secret of a black hole's "burp." Fundamentally, this refers to the energy emitted when a black hole digests stars, during which matter is violently ejected far out into space.

Black holes are incredibly dense cosmic entities with gravity so exceptionally strong that neither light nor matter can escape. The boundary of a black hole is called the Event Horizon, and escaping it would require traveling faster than the speed of light.

According to a new study from Curtin University in Australia, stars must get extremely close to a black hole to cross the event horizon, and upon reaching that point, they are destroyed. Scientists have frequently observed this destruction of stars as they approach black holes, a process referred to as "spaghettification." This means that due to extreme gravity, an object is stretched into a long, thin line, much like spaghetti.

Following spaghettification, the black hole gradually swallows the star, after which the remaining matter is ejected back into space like a fountain. Researchers liken this to the black hole letting out a burp.

However, the study discovered that this occurs in two different phases. Researchers noted that this process was previously a mystery because the ejection of matter sometimes happens within a year, while other times it occurs 3 to 5 years later.

During this research, 20 events of matter ejection from black holes were analyzed using radio telescopes. The study found that supermassive black holes eject matter in two distinct phases after digesting stars: the first time is when the black hole is rapidly swallowing the star, and the second time occurs hundreds or thousands of days later.

The findings of this study were published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

What is a Black Hole?

It is worth noting that black holes remain one of the universe's greatest mysteries, which scientists continuously strive to understand. It is a cosmic puzzle that has been given many names; sometimes it is referred to as a gateway to another universe, and other times as a pit of death.

A star becomes a black hole when all of its mass is compressed into a very tiny space. For example, if we were to compress our entire Sun into an area the size of a tennis ball, it would turn into a black hole.