The radio echoes of a black hole feeding on a star

Scientists from MIT and Johns Hopkins University have now detected radio signals from the event that match very closely with X-ray emissions produced from the same flare 13 days earlier.

They believe these radio “echoes,” which are more than 90% similar to the event’s X-ray emissions, are more than a passing coincidence. Instead, they appear to be evidence of a giant jet of highly energetic particles streaming out from the black hole as stellar material is falling in.

Dheeraj Pasham, a postdoc in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, says the highly similar patterns suggest that the power of the jet shooting out from the black hole is somehow controlled by the rate at which the black hole is feeding on the obliterated star.

“This is telling us the black hole feeding rate is controlling the strength of the jet it produces,” Pasham says. “A well-fed black hole produces a strong jet, while a malnourished black hole produces a weak jet or no jet at all. This is the first time we’ve seen a jet that’s controlled by a feeding supermassive black hole.”

Pasham says scientists have suspected that black hole jets are powered by their accretion rate, but they have never been able to observe this relationship from a single event.

“You can do this only with these special events where the black hole is just sitting there doing nothing, and then suddenly along comes a star, giving it a lot of fuel to power itself,” Pasham says. “That’s the perfect opportunity to study such things from scratch, essentially.”

Pasham and his collaborator, Sjoert van Velzen of Johns Hopkins University, report their results in a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Based on theoretical models of black hole evolution, combined with observations of distant galaxies, scientists have a general understanding for what transpires during a tidal disruption event: As a star passes close to a black hole, the black hole’s gravitational pull generates tidal forces on the star, similar to the way in which the moon stirs up tides on Earth.

However, a black hole’s gravitational forces are so immense that they can disrupt the star, stretching and flattening it like a pancake and eventually shredding the star to pieces. In the aftermath, a shower of stellar debris rains down and gets caught up in an accretion disk — a swirl of cosmic material that eventually funnels into and feeds the black hole.

This entire process generates colossal bursts of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum. Scientists have observed these bursts in the optical, ultraviolet, and X-ray bands, and also occasionally in the radio end of the spectrum.

The source of the X-ray emissions is thought to be ultrahot material in the innermost regions of the accretion disk, which is just about to fall into the black hole. Optical and ultraviolet emissions likely arise from material further out in the disk, which will eventually be pulled into the black hole.

However, what gives rise to radio emissions during a tidal disruption flare has been up for debate. “We know that the radio waves are coming from really energetic electrons that are moving in a magnetic field — that is a well-established process,” Pasham says. “The debate has been, where are these really energetic electrons coming from?”

Some scientists propose that, in the moments after the stellar explosion, a shockwave propagates outward and energises the plasma particles in the surrounding medium, in a process that in turn emits radio waves. In such a scenario, the pattern of emitted radio waves would look radically different from the pattern of X-rays produced from infalling stellar debris.

“What we found basically challenges this paradigm,” Pasham says.

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Image credit: MIT.