{"id":118900,"date":"2021-01-26T16:23:23","date_gmt":"2021-01-27T00:23:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/01\/astronomers-have-discovered-a-star-that-survived-being-swallowed-by-a-black-hole"},"modified":"2021-01-26T16:23:23","modified_gmt":"2021-01-27T00:23:23","slug":"astronomers-have-discovered-a-star-that-survived-being-swallowed-by-a-black-hole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/01\/astronomers-have-discovered-a-star-that-survived-being-swallowed-by-a-black-hole","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers Have Discovered 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-discovered-a-star-that-survived-being-swallowed-by-a-black-hole.gif\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t think that star is the same after that one night stand.<\/p>\n<hr>\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 black hole, 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 in 2019<\/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 identified a potential 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>I don\u2019t think that star is the same after that one night stand. 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, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":402,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,1635],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-118900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-materials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118900","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\/402"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118900\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}