Accretion disks.
It’s easy to think of black holes as the ultimate cosmic vacuum, that just sucks everything in cleanly and refuses to let anything back out. Well, if you were a cosmic custodian, a black hole would be the last thing you’d want to clean up your spilled stars and planets.
Black holes don’t just drag its neighbors inwards and then gobble them up in one gulp. Quite the contrary. Large objects, like stars or planets, that fall in directly won’t go out like that. Instead, what happens is an astronomically magnified form of spaghettification, where one side of the star is significantly more attracted to the black hole than the other side. The tremendous difference in the gravitational pull felt by different sides of the star is enough that the entire thing is literally torn to pieces while it’s being killed.
It’s more like a cosmic meat grinder than a cosmic vacuum.
Oh, but black holes aren’t finished yet. That’s not enough for them. They need to announce to the rest of the universe their power and superiority. As they violently rip stars large enough to make our Sun look like a peanut into pieces, they wear the removed gas and debris around their bodies like a trophy of victory. Take a look at the swirling disk of matter in the picture above.
At this stage, the name “black hole” becomes misleading, because the black hole is anything but black to our eyes. The murderous celestial object gains a new name; you’ve probably heard of it. It’s now known as a quasar, or quasi-stellar object.
After successfully demolishing a star, the quasar will acquire an accretion disk, a swirling mass of gas and debris that used to be the body of a plump, happy star. This terror will then pull the shredded corpse of its victim around its event horizon at absolutely unfathomable speeds. Friction caused by the accretion disk material smashing together generates heat. A lot of heat. Heat of a magnitude that is even more difficult to fully comprehend. And with heat, comes light.
Take a look at this photo.
On the right is a star glowing brightly a few hundred light years away.
On the left? It’s a quasar…9 billion light years away.
Think Eta Carinae is scary? A supernova? A hypernova? None of them have got an ounce of crap on what a quasar can do - if it’s feeling nice. These luminous beasts emit so much light that they can literally mask entire galaxies, containing millions upon millions of stars, with their brightness.
…And we’ve got one in the center of our galaxy. :)
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