Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogel, bam here. If you get into a fight
Speaker 1: with a black hole, the black hole is going to win.
Speaker 1: That's one of the universe's constants. Black Holes have such
Speaker 1: immense gravitational polls that they can swallow stars hole. Except
Speaker 1: one lucky star has managed to escape a black hole's destruction,
Speaker 1: or at least immediate destruction. A report from the March
Speaker 1: issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Speaker 1: detailed how this red giant star, located in a galaxy
Speaker 1: about two hundred and fifty million light years from Earth,
Speaker 1: roamed just a little too close to a supermassive black
Speaker 1: hole and became ensnared in its grasp. Unlike most stars,
Speaker 1: though it managed to escape the black hole's full embrace. Still,
Speaker 1: the black hole's immense mass about four hundred thousand times
Speaker 1: out of our Sun, and its gravitational pull has called
Speaker 1: lost the star to become stuck in an elliptical orbit
Speaker 1: around it. And I said that it's a red giant star,
Speaker 1: but really it was originally a red giant when it arrived.
Speaker 1: Since then, the star's hydrogen rich outer layers have been
Speaker 1: stripped away by the black hole, leaving just a helium
Speaker 1: rich core called a white dwarf. It orbits the black
Speaker 1: hole once every nine hours, and as pieces are stripped away,
Speaker 1: they blend with other materials circling the black hole. That
Speaker 1: process generates bursts of X rays, a sort of beacon
Speaker 1: to us earthlings. Andrew King is a professor of theoretical
Speaker 1: astrophysics at the University of Leicester in the UK, and
Speaker 1: he performed the study that found the reason for the
Speaker 1: X ray flairs. He said in a statement, the dwarf
Speaker 1: star will try hard to get away, but there's no escape.
Speaker 1: The black hole will eat it more and more slowly,
Speaker 1: but never stop. Scientists collected the data using NASA's Shandra
Speaker 1: X ray Observatory and the European Space Agencies x MM
Speaker 1: new an X ray space observatory. The encounter between this
Speaker 1: star and the black hole is an example of one
Speaker 1: of the most cataclysmic events in the universe. It's possible
Speaker 1: that the collision will generate gravitational waves or ripples in
Speaker 1: space time. Scientists typically only see these kinds of ripples
Speaker 1: during truly devastating events, such as when neutron stars crash
Speaker 1: into each other or supernova stars explode. It's not rare
Speaker 1: for scientists to find so called tidal disruption events, which
Speaker 1: is the technical term for when a black hole tears
Speaker 1: a star a limb from limb, But they say they
Speaker 1: were incredibly fortunate to have detected evidence of a star
Speaker 1: that survived its initial black hole encounter, an event that's
Speaker 1: much more rare, partly because the encounter has such a
Speaker 1: short duration of only around two thousand years, which is
Speaker 1: just a flicker of time in the universe's reckoning. More
Speaker 1: massive stars might regularly survive black holes, but their orbits
Speaker 1: around the holes would take how much time that scientists
Speaker 1: would never have the opportunity to catalog multiple X ray
Speaker 1: bursts the way that they are now. In the end,
Speaker 1: the white Dwarf could downgrade to a planet with a
Speaker 1: mass roughly that of Jupiter's. According to King, that process
Speaker 1: could take as long as a trillion years. Today's episode
Speaker 1: was written by David Chandler and produced by Tyler Playing.
Speaker 1: For more on this and lots of other topics, is
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