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The violent black hole was spotted by NASA's TESS spacecraft, searching for planets, and confirmed by ground observatories. Astronomers were alerted of the event when a star monitored by TESS became brighter unexpectedly. The event, known as tidal disturbance, causes black holes to eat whole stars or stretch them out like spaghetti dough. Stars are prey to these destructive tidal disturbances when they venture too close to a black hole.
In this particular case, the event was named ASASSN-19bt after the All-Sky automated poll for Supernovae.
ASAS-SN is a global network of 20 robotic telescope observatories headquartered at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.
The telescope network, in collaboration with NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and observatories in Chile, validated the discovery of TESS.
Dr. Thomas Holoien of the Carnegie Observatory in Pasadena said: "The TESS data allows us to know exactly when this destructive event, called ASASSN-19bt, started to clear, which we have never been able to do it before.
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"Because we quickly identified tidal disturbance using ASAS-SN (AS-SN) ground-based and sky-based survey, we were able to trigger multi-wavelength tracking observations. during the first days.
"The first data will be incredibly useful for modeling the physics of these explosions."
Dr. Holoien and his team discovered that the tidal disturbance caused the star's temperature to drop from 71,500 F to 35,500 F (40,000 to 20,000 C).
Such events are extremely rare and occur only once every 10,000 to 100,000 years in a galaxy like the Milky Way.
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Supernova eruptions, by comparison, are much more common every 100 years or so.
Until now, astronomers have observed only about forty disturbances due to tides.
NASA's TESS or Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) satellite monitors areas of the night sky to detect stars diving briefly into brightness.
Dives are caused by the passage of planets in front of the stars. This is the main means used by NASA to discover exoplanets in far-distant solar systems.
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But for the first time in the TESS mission, the space telescope has observed the opposite.
The discovery was published on September 27 in The Astrophysical Journal.
Patrick Vallely, co-author of the Ohio State University study, said, "The first data from TESS allows us to see the light very close to the black hole, much closer than we could see before. .
"They also show us that the ASSASN-19bt brightness increase was very smooth, which helps us to say that the event was a tidal disturbance and not another type of explosion, as in the center of 'a galaxy of supernova.'
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