Scientists Spotted a Light from a Star Devoured by a Supermassive Black Hole! Watch It Happen

Using telescopes from around the globe, scientists have spotted a light, emitted by a star, as it is devoured by a supermassive black hole that is 215 million light-years from Earth. And it is the closest flare of its kind ever observed.

Such phenomenon is known as a tidal disruption event. Wondering what actually causes this event?

The University of Birmingham explained through a news release that it is caused when a star passes too close to a black hole. Thus, the extreme gravitational pull from the black hole shreds the star into thin streams of material.

This process called “spaghettification”. During this process some of the material falls into the black hole, releasing a bright flare of energy which can be detected by astronomers.

“When a black hole devours a star, it can launch a powerful blast of material outwards that obstructs our view. This happens because the energy released as the black hole eats up stellar material propels the star’s debris outwards.”

– Samantha Oates from the University of Birmingham, among the authors of the study

About the Study

Although  tidal disruption events are rare and not always easy to study, an international team of scientists led by the University of Birmingham were able to study this event.

“The idea of a black hole ‘sucking in’ a nearby star sounds like science fiction. But this is exactly what happens in a tidal disruption event. We were able to investigate in detail what happens when a star is eaten by such a monster.”

– Dr. Matt Nicholl, a lecturer and Royal Astronomical Society research fellow at the University of Birmingham, the lead author of the study

The phenomenon has been identified early enough to observe the whole process. The flare called the AT2019qiz has been monitored by the team of scientists over a period of six months as it grew brighter and then faded away.

This have been done through the use of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope and New Technology Telescope, the Las Cumbres Observatory global telescope network, and the Neil Gehrel’s Swift Satellite.

“The observations showed that the star had roughly the same mass as our own Sun, and that it lost about half of that to the black hole, which is over a million times more massive.”

– Nicholl, a visiting researcher at the University of Edinburgh

The University of Birmingham, which is ranked amongst the top 100 institutions in the world, believes that the research will help astronomers to better understand supermassive black holes and how matter behaves in the extreme gravity environments around them.

The findings about their study can be found in the in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. It is called “An outflow powers the optical rise of the nearby, fast-evolving tidal disruption event AT2019qiz” and was published just on October 12, 2020.

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Source: University of Birmingham, Science Alert, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, European Southern Observatory (ESO) YouTube Channel