"A Star is Torn"

I'm pretty sure that most of us have thought of what would happen if we were sucked into a black hole. Well, there's really no answer to that yet nut what if a star was sucked in?

When a star comes close enough to a black hole to get sucked in, it gets torn apart. According to an astronomer at the University of Maryland, Suvi Gezari, this occurs only about once every 100,000 years in any galaxy.

Last September 26, this phenomenon, called tidal disruption, was observed by astronomers and was named ASASSN-19bt. It was first detected by telescopes in January but was only described in the Astrophysical Journal last September.

Scientists had been searching the sky for supernovas, or explosions that mark the death of massive stars, but instead, their robotic telescopes caught a bright flare and because of this, the researchers turned to other instruments to get a better look.

That part of the sky was also being observed by NASA’s TESS satellite as they were searching for exoplanets, or planets that orbit stars outside the solar system. The data from this satellite showed the stellar material brightening as it began circling the black hole.

The energy emitted by ASASSN-19bt, that was around 375 million light-years away from us, was about 20 billion times the energy of our sun. If this happened in the Milky Way, it would be so bright that it could probably be seen during the day.

The star was pulled apart by the intense gravity of the black hole until it was eventually stretched into a long strand of gas. It looped around the black hole, crashed into itself and formed a spiraling ring of glowing, hot gas and this is called an accretion disk.

Watch the animation of this process that was made by Science News below:

Observations of these phenomena could help physicists improve their estimations regarding the masses of black holes and how fast they spin. Data from these observations could also answer how black holes form and how this type of star activity is part of galaxy evolution.

A star may have died in the process, but this will help researchers know more about our universe.

Andrei Samantha O. Burgo | Regina Lucis High School