Andrew King, an astronomer, has declared that he is very likely to have spotted a stellar collapse with the help of a white dwarf that is sending blazes of light into the outer space. The star is located in the elliptical orbit of a black hole that is responsible for an explosion of light. The star has managed to survive its power, but not to escape it.
A white dwarf is the outcome of a star that is naturally reaching its end of life, running out of fuel, and then exploding. The scientist stated that the star is a former red dwarf that is experiencing a premature death because the black hole has absorbed all of its red dwarf gas.
The research was conducted with the help of the observations of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in collaboration with the European Space Agency and its XMM-Newton X-ray telescope. The galaxy that was analyzed is located at 250 million light-years away from our planet and was named GSN 069.
The black hole and white dwarf system
The galaxy features a series of X-ray emissions at every nine hours. Therefore, Andrew King has developed the near-miss tidal disruption theory around this event, underlining that the black hole breaks apart when a star is positioned too close.
The black hole is 400.000 times bigger than the mass of our sun, but not big enough to absorb the full star. Instead, it has trapped the white dwarf into a nine-hour orbit, slowly trying to depose it of energy.
However, the black hole will continue to do so for an eternity, but will never finish, according to the calculations of Andrew King. In addition to that, the complex could end up becoming a planet as giant as Jupiter in more than a trillion years later. The event will be visible from our planet for the upcoming 2000 years, and King is stating that there are probably many such events to analyze that have not been discovered yet.
