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NASA’s TESS Spots Supermassive Black Hole Tearing Apart A Sun-Sized Star In Rare Astronomical Observation
GIF of the video. (via NASA/YouTube)
In a rare sighting of a cosmic event, a NASA spacecraft designed to discover alien planets watched a black hole tearing apart a star in a cataclysmic phenomenon called a tidal disruption event.
Tidal disruptions are incredibly rare, occurring once every 10,000 to 100,000 years in a galaxy the size of our own Milky Way. In total, astronomers have observed only about 40 tidal disruptions so far, and scientists predicted TESS would see only one or two in its initial two-year mission.
"TESS data let us see exactly when this destructive event, named ASASSN-19bt, started to get brighter, which we've never been able to do before," Thomas Holoien from the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.
Astronomers think the supermassive black hole that generated ASASSN-19bt weighs around six million times the Sun's mass.
A paper describing the findings was published in The Astrophysical Journal.
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