Derry Queen's professor Dr Matt and team make astounding black hole discovery in joint NASA project

They discovered that a massive black hole has torn apart one star and is now using that stellar wreckage to pummel another star or smaller black hole, in a breakthrough that solves a mystery which had perplexed astronomers for years.

The startling discovery was made by the international team of astrophysicists, led by Queen’s University Belfast, using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other state-of-the-art telescopes.

The new evidence helps astronomers conclusively link two mysteries where there had previously only been hints of a connection and is the subject of a paper published on Thursday in ‘Nature’.

In 2019, astronomers witnessed the signal of a star that got too close to a black hole and was destroyed by the black hole’s gravitational forces. Once shredded, the star’s remains began circling the black hole in a disc shape in a type of ‘stellar graveyard’.

Over a few years, however, this disc has expanded outward and is now directly in the path of a star, or possibly a stellar-mass black hole, orbiting the massive black hole at a previously safe distance. The orbiting star is now repeatedly crashing through the debris disc, about once every 48 hours, as it circles. When it does, the collision causes spectacular light shows and bursts of X-rays that astronomers captured with Chandra.

Lead author, Derry man Dr Matt of Queen’s University Belfast said: “Imagine a diver repeatedly going into a pool and creating a splash every time she enters the water. The star in this comparison is like the diver and the disc is the pool, and each time the star strikes the surface it creates a huge ‘splash’ of gas and X-rays. As the star orbits around the black hole, it does this over and over again.”

Dr Matt, a former pupil of Foyle College and Oakgrove Integrated Primary School, was recognised back in 2022 by the Royal Astronomical Society with the Fowler Award for early career achievements in astronomy. The award followed the breakthroughs he has made in our understanding of astronomical transients – objects whose existence endures for just a short time, from milliseconds to several years.

Dr Nicholl’s previous works on superluminous supernovae demonstrated that these objects come from massive stars. His study of the first-detected kilonova – the afterglow from a neutron star merger – led to the development of methods to determine the radius of a neutron star.

In terms of the new discovery, scientists have long documented many cases where an object gets too close to a black hole and gets torn apart in a single burst of light. Astronomers call these ‘tidal disruption events’ (TDEs).

In recent years, astronomers have additionally discovered a new class of bright flashes from the centres of galaxies, which are detected only in X-rays and repeat many times. These events are also connected to supermassive black holes, but astronomers could not explain what caused the semi-regular bursts of X-rays. They dubbed these ‘quasi-periodic eruptions’, or QPEs.

Co-author Dr Dheeraj Pasham of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said: “There had been feverish speculation that these phenomena were connected, and now we’ve discovered the proof that they are. It’s like getting a cosmic two-for-one in terms of solving mysteries.”

The TDE now known as AT2019qiz was first discovered by a wide-field optical telescope at the Palomar Observatory, called the Zwicky Transient Facility, in 2019. In 2023, astronomers used both Chandra and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to study the debris left behind after the tidal disruption had ended.

The Chandra data was obtained during three different observations, each separated by about four to five hours. The total exposure of about 14 hours of Chandra time revealed only a weak signal in the first and last chunk, but a very strong signal in the middle observation.

From there, Dr Nicholl and team used NASA’s Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) to look frequently at AT2019qiz for repeated X-ray bursts. The NICER data showed that AT2019qiz erupts roughly every 48 hours. Observations from NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and India’s AstroSat telescope cemented the finding.

The ultraviolet data from Hubble, obtained at the same time as the Chandra observations, allowed the scientists to determine the size of the disc around the supermassive black hole. They found that the disc had become large enough that if any object was orbiting the black hole with a period of about a week or less, it would collide with the disc and cause eruptions.

Co-author Dr Andrew Mummery of Oxford University said: “This is a huge breakthrough in our understanding of the origin of these regular eruptions. We now realise we need to wait a few years for the eruptions to ‘turn on’ after a star has been torn apart because it takes some time for the disc to spread out far enough to encounter another star.”

This result has implications for searching for more QPEs associated with tidal disruptions. Finding more of these would allow astronomers to measure the prevalence and distances of objects in close orbits around supermassive black holes. Some of these may be excellent targets for the planned future gravitational wave observatories.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.

The paper describing these results is available online now at https://www.nature.com and will appear in the October 24 print issue of Nature.

You can read the full article here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08023-6