Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2021

34 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2021 ASTRO PUBLISHING astronomers been able to shed light on the origin of this curtain. “We found that, when a black hole devours a star, it can launch a pow- erful blast of material outwards that obstructs our view,” explains Saman- tha Oates, also at the University of Birmingham. This happens because the energy released as the black hole eats up stellar material propels the star’s debris outwards. The discovery was possible because the tidal disruption event the team studied, AT2019qiz, was found just a short time after the star was ripped apart. “Because we caught it early, we could actually see the cur- tain of dust and debris being drawn up as the black hole launched a powerful outflow of material with velocities up to 10,000 km/s,” says Kate Alexander, NASA Einstein Fel- low at Northwestern University in the US. “This unique ‘peek behind the curtain’ provided the first op- portunity to pinpoint the origin of the obscuring material and follow in real time how it engulfs the black hole.” The team carried out observations of AT2019qiz, located in a spiral galaxy in the constellation of Eridanus, over a 6- month period as the flare grew in luminosity and then faded away. “Several sky surveys discovered emission from the new tidal disruption event very quickly after the star was ripped apart,” says Wevers. “We immediately pointed a suite of ground-based and space telescopes in that direction to see how the light was produced.” Multiple observations of the event were taken over the following months with facilities that included X- shooter and EFOSC2, pow- erful instruments on ESO’s T his animation depicts a star experiencing spaghettification as it’s sucked in by a supermassive black hole during a ‘tidal disruption event’. In a new study, done with the help of ESO’s Very Large Telescope and ESO’s New Tech- nology 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] by the black hole. “ The observations showed that the star had roughly the same mass as our own Sun, and that it lost about half of that to the monster black hole, which is over a million times more massive,” says Nicholl, who is also a visiting re- searcher at the University of Edin- burgh. The research helps us bet- ter understand supermas- sive black holes and how matter behaves in the ex- treme gravity environ- ments around them. The team say AT2019qiz could even act as a ‘Rosetta stone’ for interpreting fu- ture observations of tidal disruption events. ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), planned to start op- erating this decade, will enable researchers to de- tect increasingly fainter and faster evolving tidal disruption events, to solve further mysteries of black hole physics. T his video sequence zooms in on the galaxy where the AT2019qiz tidal disruption event is taking place. This phe- nomenon, a blast of light from a star being ripped apart by a supermassive black hole, has been studied by ESO telescopes. [ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2/N. Risinger (skysurvey.org ). Music: Astral Electronics] VLT and ESO’s NTT, which are situ- ated in Chile. The prompt and ex- tensive observations in ultraviolet, optical, X-ray and radio light re- vealed, for the first time, a direct connection between the material flowing out from the star and the bright flare emitted as it is devoured !