Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2021

32 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2021 ASTRO PUBLISHING The last moments of a star devoured by a black hole U sing telescopes from the Euro- pean Southern Observatory (ESO) and other organisations around the world, astronomers have spotted a rare blast of light from a star being ripped apart by a super- massive black hole. The phenomenon, known as a tidal disruption event, is the closest such flare recorded to date at just over 215 million light-years from Earth, and has been studied in unprece- dented detail. The research is pub- lished in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society . “The idea of a black hole ‘sucking in’ a nearby star sounds like science fiction. But this is exactly what hap- pens in a tidal disruption event,” says Matt Nicholl, a lecturer and Royal Astronomical Society research fellow at the University of Birming- ham, UK, and the lead author of the new study. But these tidal disruption events, where a star experiences by ESO T his illustration depicts a star (in the foreground) experiencing spaghettifi- cation as it’s sucked in by a supermassive black hole (in the background) during a ‘tidal disruption event’. In a new study, done with the help of ESO’s Very Large Telescope and ESO’s New Technology Telescope, a team of astronomers found that when a black hole devours a star, it can launch a powerful blast of material outwards. [ESO/M. Kornmesser]