Years after ripping stars to shreds, 24 black holes suddenly flared up with radio waves in inexplicable 'burping' bouts. Half of all star-killing black holes may experience the same.
I imagine they don't actually know if it's the same material. What they can say is that a certain amount of material was ejected, that correlates with certain properties of an observed amount of material that went in. Realistically though, it's all hydrogen and helium and is one atom of the same thing really that different from another?
I remember when I used to believe that nothing escaped a black hole past the event horizon. I remember when I used to think a black hole was an actual hole. I sure hope Santa isn't late this year. There are some things still with believing in.
There's the hard event horizon and then there's multiple radii past it with different effects on orbits (such as the photon orbit radius, stable circular orbit radius, etc) and if you're very close you're also dealing with "weaker" horizons like a radius where most light gets redshifted past visibility even if mass can still escape if it's fast enough.
I wonder if it's going to turn out to be analogous to throwing a ball into a cylinder, where some of the matter enters at a precise trajectory that basically causes it to bounce back out? Assuming nothing is actually exiting from the event horizon, maybe there's some sort of stratification of the elements within the accretion disk? Or maybe there are oddly hyper-stable orbits, why they're lasting years, and it's analogous to the way a coin can take a very long time to settle when falling on its side.
It seems less likely that there's a mechanism by which something can actually cross the event horizon from inside, but who knows, new physics might be out there to have something to say about it.
Edit: I'd be REALLY curious to know whether the time interval of the delay is correlated with the half-life of any radioactive elements that would be present in the devoured star.
The consumed star is no longer a gravitationally bound object, it is torn apart by tidal forces. She says the disk is supposedly unstable and half should disperse within hours and the rest within a month or so, so this delay is odd.
There is no way to return across the event horizon. You'd have to go faster than light and all timelines lead to the singularity inside the EH.
There is no such massive reservoir of unstable isotopes in stars and even if there was it wouldn't all decay in a single event.
My guess is the event horizon has always been viewed as this perfectly spherical (or oblate spherical) construct - I bet it is much more messy than that. I bet the event horizon moves around and the movement allows for materials to be ejected.
I am probably looking to deep into this but a recent kurtzgesagt claimed that once you get to the event horizon time and space switch into eachother. Your no getting sucked into the center. But your falling into the future.
Sm coming back out years later doesn’t sound like a contradiction to that,
There's almost nothing more contradictory to that. While within a black hole, time becomes space-like, with your future being the inevitable center. The only possible way to escape would be to go back in time.
Well that's assuming einsteinian physics, black holes are one of the few cases our physics stops making much sense.
I guess the future being at the center is what makes it confusing to me.
In my head disappearing while being pulled towards their future and then someMaterial being burped out in the future sound like some parts arrived at a destination.
I would assume the material being burped out has been inside while l pulled towards the future till it no longer was.