Can a Star Survive a Black Hole Encounter?

In the long run, a black hole will consume any star that crosses its path -- but researchers have found one that should hang on for a few trillion years. Learn more about it in this episode of BrainStuff.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogel, bam here. If you get into a fight
with a black hole, the black hole is going to win.
That's one of the universe's constants. Black Holes have such
immense gravitational polls that they can swallow stars hole. Except

(00:22):
one lucky star has managed to escape a black hole's destruction,
or at least immediate destruction. A report from the March
issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
detailed how this red giant star, located in a galaxy
about two hundred and fifty million light years from Earth,
roamed just a little too close to a supermassive black

(00:44):
hole and became ensnared in its grasp. Unlike most stars,
though it managed to escape the black hole's full embrace. Still,
the black hole's immense mass about four hundred thousand times
out of our Sun, and its gravitational pull has called
lost the star to become stuck in an elliptical orbit
around it. And I said that it's a red giant star,

(01:06):
but really it was originally a red giant when it arrived.
Since then, the star's hydrogen rich outer layers have been
stripped away by the black hole, leaving just a helium
rich core called a white dwarf. It orbits the black
hole once every nine hours, and as pieces are stripped away,
they blend with other materials circling the black hole. That

(01:27):
process generates bursts of X rays, a sort of beacon
to us earthlings. Andrew King is a professor of theoretical
astrophysics at the University of Leicester in the UK, and
he performed the study that found the reason for the
X ray flairs. He said in a statement, the dwarf
star will try hard to get away, but there's no escape.

(01:47):
The black hole will eat it more and more slowly,
but never stop. Scientists collected the data using NASA's Shandra
X ray Observatory and the European Space Agencies x MM
new an X ray space observatory. The encounter between this
star and the black hole is an example of one
of the most cataclysmic events in the universe. It's possible

(02:09):
that the collision will generate gravitational waves or ripples in
space time. Scientists typically only see these kinds of ripples
during truly devastating events, such as when neutron stars crash
into each other or supernova stars explode. It's not rare
for scientists to find so called tidal disruption events, which

(02:30):
is the technical term for when a black hole tears
a star a limb from limb, But they say they
were incredibly fortunate to have detected evidence of a star
that survived its initial black hole encounter, an event that's
much more rare, partly because the encounter has such a
short duration of only around two thousand years, which is
just a flicker of time in the universe's reckoning. More

(02:54):
massive stars might regularly survive black holes, but their orbits
around the holes would take how much time that scientists
would never have the opportunity to catalog multiple X ray
bursts the way that they are now. In the end,
the white Dwarf could downgrade to a planet with a
mass roughly that of Jupiter's. According to King, that process

(03:15):
could take as long as a trillion years. Today's episode
was written by David Chandler and produced by Tyler Playing.
For more on this and lots of other topics, is
it how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is a
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts in My
Heart radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,

(03:35):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.