WEBVTT - Can a Star Survive a Black Hole Encounter?

0:00:01.920 --> 0:00:07.240
<v Speaker 1>Welcome to Brainstuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff,

0:00:07.320 --> 0:00:10.879
<v Speaker 1>Lauren Vogel, bam here. If you get into a fight

0:00:10.920 --> 0:00:13.520
<v Speaker 1>with a black hole, the black hole is going to win.

0:00:13.960 --> 0:00:17.599
<v Speaker 1>That's one of the universe's constants. Black Holes have such

0:00:17.640 --> 0:00:22.320
<v Speaker 1>immense gravitational polls that they can swallow stars hole. Except

0:00:22.640 --> 0:00:26.320
<v Speaker 1>one lucky star has managed to escape a black hole's destruction,

0:00:26.560 --> 0:00:30.840
<v Speaker 1>or at least immediate destruction. A report from the March

0:00:30.920 --> 0:00:34.600
<v Speaker 1>issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

0:00:34.640 --> 0:00:38.120
<v Speaker 1>detailed how this red giant star, located in a galaxy

0:00:38.159 --> 0:00:40.720
<v Speaker 1>about two hundred and fifty million light years from Earth,

0:00:41.280 --> 0:00:44.320
<v Speaker 1>roamed just a little too close to a supermassive black

0:00:44.360 --> 0:00:48.600
<v Speaker 1>hole and became ensnared in its grasp. Unlike most stars,

0:00:48.600 --> 0:00:53.320
<v Speaker 1>though it managed to escape the black hole's full embrace. Still,

0:00:53.479 --> 0:00:56.800
<v Speaker 1>the black hole's immense mass about four hundred thousand times

0:00:56.800 --> 0:01:00.000
<v Speaker 1>out of our Sun, and its gravitational pull has called

0:01:00.000 --> 0:01:02.960
<v Speaker 1>lost the star to become stuck in an elliptical orbit

0:01:03.040 --> 0:01:06.559
<v Speaker 1>around it. And I said that it's a red giant star,

0:01:06.680 --> 0:01:10.200
<v Speaker 1>but really it was originally a red giant when it arrived.

0:01:10.760 --> 0:01:13.959
<v Speaker 1>Since then, the star's hydrogen rich outer layers have been

0:01:14.000 --> 0:01:16.840
<v Speaker 1>stripped away by the black hole, leaving just a helium

0:01:16.880 --> 0:01:20.080
<v Speaker 1>rich core called a white dwarf. It orbits the black

0:01:20.120 --> 0:01:23.400
<v Speaker 1>hole once every nine hours, and as pieces are stripped away,

0:01:23.680 --> 0:01:27.000
<v Speaker 1>they blend with other materials circling the black hole. That

0:01:27.080 --> 0:01:30.520
<v Speaker 1>process generates bursts of X rays, a sort of beacon

0:01:30.560 --> 0:01:34.800
<v Speaker 1>to us earthlings. Andrew King is a professor of theoretical

0:01:34.840 --> 0:01:38.200
<v Speaker 1>astrophysics at the University of Leicester in the UK, and

0:01:38.400 --> 0:01:41.200
<v Speaker 1>he performed the study that found the reason for the

0:01:41.360 --> 0:01:44.400
<v Speaker 1>X ray flairs. He said in a statement, the dwarf

0:01:44.480 --> 0:01:47.400
<v Speaker 1>star will try hard to get away, but there's no escape.

0:01:47.720 --> 0:01:50.480
<v Speaker 1>The black hole will eat it more and more slowly,

0:01:50.800 --> 0:01:55.760
<v Speaker 1>but never stop. Scientists collected the data using NASA's Shandra

0:01:55.960 --> 0:01:59.640
<v Speaker 1>X ray Observatory and the European Space Agencies x MM

0:01:59.760 --> 0:02:03.920
<v Speaker 1>new an X ray space observatory. The encounter between this

0:02:03.960 --> 0:02:06.280
<v Speaker 1>star and the black hole is an example of one

0:02:06.280 --> 0:02:09.959
<v Speaker 1>of the most cataclysmic events in the universe. It's possible

0:02:09.960 --> 0:02:13.360
<v Speaker 1>that the collision will generate gravitational waves or ripples in

0:02:13.440 --> 0:02:17.720
<v Speaker 1>space time. Scientists typically only see these kinds of ripples

0:02:17.800 --> 0:02:21.840
<v Speaker 1>during truly devastating events, such as when neutron stars crash

0:02:21.880 --> 0:02:27.000
<v Speaker 1>into each other or supernova stars explode. It's not rare

0:02:27.040 --> 0:02:30.880
<v Speaker 1>for scientists to find so called tidal disruption events, which

0:02:30.960 --> 0:02:33.600
<v Speaker 1>is the technical term for when a black hole tears

0:02:33.600 --> 0:02:36.560
<v Speaker 1>a star a limb from limb, But they say they

0:02:36.560 --> 0:02:39.440
<v Speaker 1>were incredibly fortunate to have detected evidence of a star

0:02:39.560 --> 0:02:43.079
<v Speaker 1>that survived its initial black hole encounter, an event that's

0:02:43.160 --> 0:02:46.480
<v Speaker 1>much more rare, partly because the encounter has such a

0:02:46.520 --> 0:02:49.960
<v Speaker 1>short duration of only around two thousand years, which is

0:02:50.080 --> 0:02:53.959
<v Speaker 1>just a flicker of time in the universe's reckoning. More

0:02:54.040 --> 0:02:58.400
<v Speaker 1>massive stars might regularly survive black holes, but their orbits

0:02:58.480 --> 0:03:01.680
<v Speaker 1>around the holes would take how much time that scientists

0:03:01.760 --> 0:03:04.919
<v Speaker 1>would never have the opportunity to catalog multiple X ray

0:03:04.919 --> 0:03:07.840
<v Speaker 1>bursts the way that they are now. In the end,

0:03:08.040 --> 0:03:10.960
<v Speaker 1>the white Dwarf could downgrade to a planet with a

0:03:11.080 --> 0:03:15.000
<v Speaker 1>mass roughly that of Jupiter's. According to King, that process

0:03:15.040 --> 0:03:23.320
<v Speaker 1>could take as long as a trillion years. Today's episode

0:03:23.360 --> 0:03:25.799
<v Speaker 1>was written by David Chandler and produced by Tyler Playing.

0:03:26.240 --> 0:03:27.919
<v Speaker 1>For more on this and lots of other topics, is

0:03:27.960 --> 0:03:30.239
<v Speaker 1>it how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is a

0:03:30.240 --> 0:03:32.600
<v Speaker 1>production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts in My

0:03:32.639 --> 0:03:35.520
<v Speaker 1>Heart radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,

0:03:35.600 --> 0:03:37.320
<v Speaker 1>or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.