Homer Simpson is probably the most popular American fictional person in the world. The father of the Simpson family and protagonist of the program created by Matt Groening who can be proud that his creation inspired the name of a black hole discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) Hubble recently captured the AT2022dsbbut scientists have preferred to give it a nickname to identify it more easily and for other study reasons: Homer Simpson.
Calling a black hole Homer Simpson must have a scientific, logical, and fun reason. As a report published on the website of esquirethe event observed by the Hubble telescope, almost 300 million light years away, is a “Tidal Destruction Event”.
This phenomenon occurs when a star gets too close to a black hole and is torn apart by its immense gravitational force, that is, it is opening the star, turning it into a kind of gas and debris donut, and then devouring it. Exactly: Mmmmm, donuts.
How did the experts detect it?
Peter Maksym, a co-investigator at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, spoke about this discovery: “In general, these phenomena are difficult to observe. Perhaps some observations will be made early in the outage, when it is very bright. Our program is different in that it is designed to look at a few tides over the course of a year and see what happens.”.
“We saw it early enough to be able to observe it in these intense phases of black hole accretion. We saw the rate of accretion slow as it became a trickle over time”, concludes the scientist.
The conclusion of the experts is that this finding will provide a lot of information about this very special phase in the existence of a black hole.