
Doomed Star on a Collision Course with Destiny: Will It Be Ripped Apart in Just 6 Years?
2025-05-09
Author: Wei
A distant star is racing toward its doom in a galaxy 300 million light-years away, caught in a perilous dance with a supermassive black hole known as "Ansky." This cosmic tale unfolds as the star repeatedly plunges through a searing disk of hot gas, unleashing explosive bursts of X-rays that signal its impending destruction.
Discovered by astronomers using the Zwicky Transient Facility in 2019, Ansky, officially designated ZTF10acnsky, has astonished scientists by emitting powerful quasi-periodic eruptions (QPEs) roughly every four-and-a-half days. Each eruption lasts about a day and a half, making Ansky one of the most energetic sources of QPEs known.
A team led by MIT’s Joheem Chakraborty, using NASA's NICER and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton telescopes, delves into these mysterious phenomena. 9"These QPEs are deeply intriguing due to their quasi-periodic nature," Chakraborty expressed. "Understanding them could unlock further mysteries of black hole behavior."
The black hole, with a gravitational pull equivalent to a million suns, is surrounded by an accretion disk—a swirling mass of hot gas eager to be devoured. A lower-mass star orbits perilously close to Ansky, periodically crashing through this disk and creating shockwaves that heat the surrounding material. This heated gas then erupts into space, generating the dramatic X-ray flares.
Interestingly, while most QPE-producing systems see the black hole tearing apart passing stars, Ansky's different circumstances suggest a larger disk, allowing it to interact with objects farther away and extend its cycle.
Chakraborty's team meticulously observed Ansky 16 times a day over several months in 2024, tracking the periodic eruptions. Their findings present a grim fate for the star: with each encounter, it loses orbital energy, spiraling closer to the black hole. Assuming it resembles our sun, it faces annihilation within the next 5 to 6 years, after around 400 QPEs.
As the orbit degenerates, QPEs will occur more frequently, offering clues about the star's mass and its inevitable collision course with the black hole.
"Our observations of Ansky could reveal the spectacular moment when a star is shredded in real-time," Chakraborty said. As NICER and XMM-Newton continue to scrutinize this cosmic drama, the scientific community eagerly anticipates the star's final moments, delivering a breathtaking spectacle of stellar destruction.