SOME of the brightest flashes in the universe may be the result of black holes burrowing into stars and devouring them from inside.
The flashes are known as gamma-ray bursts because most of their energy is in the form of high-energy radiation, including gamma rays and X-rays. The longer flashes, lasting at least a few seconds, have long been thought to signal the deaths of massive stars that have run out of fuel, causing them to collapse to form black holes, unleashing powerful jets of radiation in the process.
Now an alternative explanation has been given new lease of life: a black hole may instead be an external attacker that dives into the belly of a massive star and consumes it.
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Although both scenarios involve a black hole, an invader might take more time to finish gobbling up the star鈥檚 matter, releasing radiation for longer. Calculations by Maxim Barkov and Serguei Komissarov, both at the University of Leeds, UK, show this could account for lingering X-ray emissions seen several minutes after some gamma-ray bursts begin, which have proved hard to explain ().
鈥淲here this model really shines is explaining the late emission,鈥� says of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico 鈥� one of the physicists who first proposed the burrowing black hole theory in the 1990s. It remains to be seen if it can account for the extreme brightness seen at the beginning of gamma-ray bursts, he says.
