Spaghettification: Telescopes Record Last Moments of Star Devoured by a Black Hole

Astronomers have managed to review in detail a rare blast of light from a star being devoured because it was sucked in toward a supermassive black hole. Undergoing a process referred to as “spaghettification,” the doomed star’s atmosphere was pulled away, stretched and compressed into thin streams by the black hole’s titanic gravity.

Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory and other institutions administered an in depth set of observations focused on AT2019qiz, a tidal disruption event that was discovered during a spiral nebula in the constellation Eridanus shortly after the shredding began. At 215 million light years away, it's the closest such flare detected up to now.

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Material from a shredded star is heated to enormous temperatures because it is pulled into the black hole, generating detectable flares. But up to now, astronomers have had trouble studying such events intimately because they're obscured by intervening clouds of gas and dust.

“We found that, when a black hole devours a star, it can launch a strong blast of material outwards that obstructs our view,” said Samantha Oates, a researcher at the University of Birmingham.

Because astronomers were ready to catch AT2019qiz early within the process, “we could actually see the curtain of dust and debris being involved because the black hole launched a powerful outflow of material with velocities up to 10,000 (kilometres per second),” said Kate Alexander, a NASA Einstein Fellow at Northwestern University within the us.

The team studied AT2019qiz over a six-month period because the flare brightened then faded away, making observations across the electromagnetic spectrum, from ultraviolet, X-ray and optical emissions to radio waves, finding an immediate connection between the material flowing outward from the star and therefore the flare generated because the region feasted on the star’s debris.

The research promises to shed more light on how matter behaves within the extreme-gravity environment of a supermassive black hole and should help astronomers interpret future observations of tidal disruption events.

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