Dimming Quasar: This Is What Happens When a Black Hole Has Eaten Its Fill
Scientists with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) proclaimed on Friday, Jan. 8 that a quasar is running on empty after a black hole sucked up all of the star’s gas. The news comes just days after NASA announced that another black hole belched.
The researchers had been observing the quasar, SDSS J1011+5442, for about a decade, watching as its black hole heart absorbed the gas that kept the star lit. The quasar’s changing emission over 12 years was “stunning,” remarked Penn State University’s Michael Eracleous, an astrophysicist.
“The luminosity of the gas declined by over a factor of 50; if we had taken our first observations of the quasar today, we would view it as a typical galaxy with no suggestion that it hosted a supermassive black hole,” said Eracleous.
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