A supermassive black hole ripped apart a star and brought together astronomers from around the world

[Celerity]

Astronomers spotted a ‘weird’ flash in February, equivalent to the light of more than 1,000 trillion suns.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/1/23487280/black-hole-jet-astronomy-telescopes-energy


An artist’s impression of a tidal disruption event. Image: Carl Knox – OzGrav, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, Swinburne University of Technology

It was an event not seen in more than a decade: a sudden flash of energy launched out from the center of a distant galaxy, bright enough to be visible from 8.5 billion light-years away. With a burst of light equivalent to more than 1,000 trillion suns, the flash was first detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility, a survey of the entire night sky conducted from the Palomar Observatory in California.

“On Valentine’s Day this year, we found a source that was puzzling. It was just weird!” Igor Andreoni of the University of Maryland, lead author of one of two papers about the event, told The Verge. “And weird is good in science. It means it’s something you can learn from.”

Within days, astronomers around the world turned their telescopes toward the flash, observing it in X-ray, radio, and other wavelengths. It was extraordinarily bright and was similar to a gamma-ray burst — a type of bright flash usually detected by gamma ray or X-ray telescopes. But this one had been spotted by an optical telescope.

The tremendous brightness of the flash led astronomers to conclude that it must have been caused by a star being torn apart. A star had wandered too close to the supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy and been shredded by the gravitational forces. “It can completely rip apart the star. It’s literally pulled and stretched until it can’t stand together anymore,” Andreoni explained. This is called a tidal disruption event, and astronomers have spotted dozens of these events over recent years.

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