Gargantuan Black Hole Shreds Star in a rare cosmic find

NASA Space Telescope Searching for Extraterrestrial Planets Just Stumbled on a Rare Cosmic Crime Scene: A Star Eatered by a Monster black hole.

The discovery, made by NASA Satellite of study in transit on the exoplanets (TESS), offers a rare glimpse of the agony of a star torn by the cataclysmic gravitational forces of a supermassive black hole. The action takes place about 375 million light-years away from the Earth towards the constellation Volans.

The star and the black hole, known as ASASSN-19bt, are what scientists call a tidal disturbance event, or TDE, in which the gravity of a black hole tears off the gas of a star, throwing in space. The rest forms a shiny disc that gradually falls into the black hole, researchers said.

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"Only a handful of TDEs were discovered before reaching their maximum brightness, and this one was found only a few days after starting to brighten," said astronomer Thomas Holoien of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, in a statement. .

Holoien said that NASA's TESS system, which looks for declines in starlight to identify potential planets, observed ASASSN-19bt every half hour for months, providing a detailed account of the destruction of l & # 39; star.

"This makes ASASSN-19bt the new TDE search display," said Holoien, a founding member of the ASA-SN's Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) of the US State University. Ohio (Ohio State).

Holoien and his colleagues used TESS data as well as observations from other ground-based telescopes and observatories to reconstruct the history of ASASSN's star-strike. -19bt for months at the beginning of 2019. They followed it for 42 days before reaching its peak in March, then followed for an additional 37 days as it weakened, with observations in the following months.

The research is described in detail in the September 26 edition of The Astrophysical Journal and is also featured on the arXiv.org pre-print website here.

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"To have so much data on ASASSN-19bt will allow us to improve our understanding of the physics at work when a star will have the misfortune of encountering a black hole," said Decker French, Carnegie astronomer and member of the board. # 39; study team, the statement.

The researchers found that the ASASSN-19bt host galaxy appeared younger and more dusty than those containing other EDTs found in previous studies. The team also spotted a "cool shot" of cooling and fading before the TDE temperature stabilized and began to dazzle to its fullest.

Scientists were also able to measure the light of the ASASSN-19bt star to learn more about the composition of the object, even when the star was torn apart.

"It used to be thought that all EDTs would look the same, but it turns out that astronomers simply needed the ability to observe them in more detail," said the astronomer. State of Ohio, Patrick Vallely, in his release. "We have so much to learn about their operation, which is why it was crucial to capture them so early and have exquisite observations of TESS."

The NASA TESS Space Telescope was launched in April 2018 to search for extraterrestrial planets around distant stars. To date, the space telescope has spotted 24 confirmed exoplanets and 993 other candidate worlds.

ASASSN-19bt is not the only non-planetary discovery of TESS. The space telescope also observed a comet in our solar system, found new evidence of exocometes around the star Beta Pictoris at 63 light-years from Earth and spotted at least six stars in explosion ( called supernovas) in its first few months of operation.

Send an email to Tariq Malik at [email protected] or follow him @tariqjmalik. follow us @Spacedotcom and Facebook.