{"id":106113,"date":"2020-04-27T06:05:41","date_gmt":"2020-04-27T13:05:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/04\/astronomers-have-found-a-star-that-survived-being-swallowed-by-a-black-hole"},"modified":"2020-04-27T06:05:41","modified_gmt":"2020-04-27T13:05:41","slug":"astronomers-have-found-a-star-that-survived-being-swallowed-by-a-black-hole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/04\/astronomers-have-found-a-star-that-survived-being-swallowed-by-a-black-hole","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers Have Found a Star That Survived Being Swallowed by a Black Hole"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/astronomers-have-found-a-star-that-survived-being-swallowed-by-a-black-hole.gif\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>When <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/black-holes\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"black holes\">black holes<\/a> swallow down massive amounts of matter from the space around them, they\u2019re not exactly subtle about it. They belch out tremendous flares of X-rays, generated by the material heating to intense temperatures as it\u2019s sucked towards the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/black-holes\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"black hole\">black hole<\/a>, so bright we can detect them from Earth.<\/p>\n<p>This is normal black hole behaviour. What isn\u2019t normal is for those X-ray flares to spew forth with clockwork regularity, a puzzling behaviour <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/this-supermassive-black-hole-has-an-bizarrely-regular-feeding-schedule\">reported last year<\/a> from a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy 250 million light-years away. Every nine hours, boom \u2014 X-ray flare.<\/p>\n<p>After careful study, astronomer Andrew King of the University of Leicester in the UK believes he has identified the cause \u2014 a dead star that\u2019s endured its brush with a black hole, trapped on a nine-hour, elliptical orbit around it. Every close pass, or periastron, the black hole slurps up more of the star\u2019s material.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When black holes swallow down massive amounts of matter from the space around them, they\u2019re not exactly subtle about it. They belch out tremendous flares of X-rays, generated by the material heating to intense temperatures as it\u2019s sucked towards the black hole, so bright we can detect them from Earth. This is normal black hole [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,1635],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-106113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-materials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106113\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}