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Black hole keeps snacking on white dwarf locked in its orbit - Space
Black holes can have a little star gas, as a treat.
This black hole's parents never told it not to play with its food.
An astronomer thinks he's spotted a stellar corpse known as a white dwarf sending out blazes of light, mayday signals from its uncomfortably close orbit of a black hole. And while such a white dwarf is usually the result of a star naturally running out of fuel and exploding, the scientist thinks the black hole itself snatched all of a red giant's free gas away, triggering the premature death. Such is the peril of treading too close to a black hole even if it can't gobble you up.
"In my interpretation of the X-ray data, the white dwarf survived, but it did not escape," Andrew King, author of the new research and an astrophysicist at the University of Leicester in the UK, said in a NASA statement. "It is now caught in an elliptical orbit around the black hole, making one trip around about once every nine hours."
Black holes can have a little star gas, as a treat.
This black hole's parents never told it not to play with its food.
An astronomer thinks he's spotted a stellar corpse known as a white dwarf sending out blazes of light, mayday signals from its uncomfortably close orbit of a black hole. And while such a white dwarf is usually the result of a star naturally running out of fuel and exploding, the scientist thinks the black hole itself snatched all of a red giant's free gas away, triggering the premature death. Such is the peril of treading too close to a black hole even if it can't gobble you up.
"In my interpretation of the X-ray data, the white dwarf survived, but it did not escape," Andrew King, author of the new research and an astrophysicist at the University of Leicester in the UK, said in a NASA statement. "It is now caught in an elliptical orbit around the black hole, making one trip around about once every nine hours."