Missing link between a supernova and a black hole is finally revealed

How is a black hole formed? In the simplest language, a black hole is born when a star dies. Now, astronomers have claimed that they might have just witnessed the birth of such a black hole in a major first. This is huge for the scientific community worldwide as it directly links the death of a star to the formation of a black hole-like compact object.

“Our research is like solving a puzzle by gathering all possible evidence,” Ping Chen, a researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and lead author of a study published in Nature, was quoted as saying by Cosomos Magazine.

How did it start?

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It started with the discovery of a super bright object in space, called SN 2022jli. The object, located some 76 million years away, was discovered by a South African amateur astronomer, Berto Monard. Soon it was confirmed that they had their eyes set on a supernova. A supernova occurs just as a star is breathing its last, or when a black hole is about to form.

Supernovas are hard to study because they are impossible to predict and quickly disappear.

How SN 2022jli startled scientists?

SN 2022jli didn’t play by the normal space rules. Usually, a supernova starts out bright but fades gradually. In SN 2022jli’s case, the supernova had its share of ups and downs, switching from bright to dim and back to bright within days.

“In SN 2022jli’s data we see a repeating sequence of brightening and fading,” says Thomas Moore, a scientist from Queen’s University Belfast, whose study of the supernova was published last year in the Astrophysical Journal.

“This is the first time that repeated periodic oscillations, over many cycles, have been detected in a supernova light curve,” Moore added.

Possible explanation for this anomaly

Scientists believe that a surviving second star from the supernova explosion is responsible for revealing the compact object. They theorise that either a black hole or neutron star is gulping hydrogen from its companion's 'puffy' atmosphere, a process known as accretion. The resulting energy waves detected by researchers correspond to these oscillations.

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“The unprecedented properties of SN 2022jli tell that whatever happens in the system should be a rare phenomenon, which might be explained by the rarity of a bound binary system surviving a supernova explosion,” the researchers wrote in their Nature paper.

(With inputs from agencies)