![]() “They’re our window into the real-time feeding of a massive black hole lurking in the center of a galaxy.” “Tidal disruption events are a sort of cosmic laboratory,” said study co-author Suvi Gezari, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. The observability and short duration of tidal disruption events make them especially attractive to astronomers, who can tease apart how the black hole’s gravity manipulates the material around it, creating incredible light shows and new physical features. And from start to finish, the process often takes only a matter of weeks or months. Even around these bright sources, but especially around much less active black holes, a single star being torn apart and consumed stands out. In some cases, these disks shine brighter than entire galaxies. Most black holes that scientists can study are surrounded by hot gas that has accumulated over many years, sometimes millennia, and formed disks billions of miles wide. The work demonstrates how the destruction of a star by a black hole – a process formally known as a tidal disruption event – could be used to better understand what happens to material that’s captured by one of these behemoths before it’s fully devoured. NASA’s NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescopic Array) satellite is the most sensitive space telescope capable of observing these wavelengths of light, and the event’s proximity provided an unprecedented view of the corona’s formation and evolution, according to a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal. ![]() This indicated that as the stellar material was pulled toward its doom, it formed an extremely hot structure above the black hole called a corona. Once the star had been thoroughly ruptured by the black hole’s gravity, astronomers saw a dramatic rise in high-energy X-ray light around the black hole. Located about 250 million light-years from Earth in the center of another galaxy, it was the fifth-closest example of a black hole destroying a star ever observed. Multiple NASA telescopes recently observed a massive black hole tearing apart an unlucky star that wandered too close. Recent observations of a black hole devouring a wandering star may help scientists understand more complex black hole feeding behaviors.
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