Astronomers have released awe-inspiring footage recreating the moment a black hole tears apart a star millions of light-years away.
NASA’S Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which has been tasked with searching space for new planets witnessed more than it bargained for.
The incredible phenomenon, called a tidal disruption event, is extremely rare – occurring only once every 10,000 to 100,000 years – and this is the first time TESS has captured such a moment.
You can check out the footage for yourself below:
The event, named ASASSN-19bt, was first discovered on January 29 this year by a worldwide network of 20 robotic telescopes headquartered at Ohio State University, according to NASA.
Although TESS was able to capture the phenomenon just months after launching in April 2018, NASA says scientists have only been able to observe approximately 40 tidal disruptions in history.
Padi Boyd, the TESS project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said:
For TESS to observe ASASSN-19bt so early in its tenure, and in the continuous viewing zone where we could watch it for so long, is really quite extraordinary.
Future collaborations with observatories around the world and in orbit will help us learn even more about the different outbursts that light up the cosmos.
The full findings, which were published in The Astrophysical Journal, as per WOSU Radio, make clear that the conditions have to be just right for a black hole to tear apart a star; the star can’t be too close that it simply gets sucked up, and it can’t be too far that it bounces off and out into the galaxy.
Astronomers believe the black hole weighs around six million times the sun’s mass, and is located approximately 375 million light-years away in a galaxy of similar size to the Milky Way, NASA said.
Using their collected data, astronomers were able to determine that the temperature dropped by about 50 per cent – from around 71,500°F to 35,500°F – over a few days, and there was a low level of X-ray emission at the time of the event.
Although scientists are yet to fully understand why tidal disruptions produce so much UV emission and so few X-rays, S. Bradley Cenko, Swift’s principal investigator at Goddard, has offered a number of theories.
One such theory is that the light bounces through the newly created debris and loses energy, while another is that perhaps the disk forms further from the black hole than initially believed and so the light isn’t as affected by the object’s extreme gravity.
Cenko continued:
More early-time observations of these events may help us answer some of these lingering questions.
Whatever the answer is, I think we can all agree this is perhaps the most impressive footage to come out of NASA in recent years.
Mind = blown.
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A Broadcast Journalism Masters graduate who went on to achieve an NCTJ level 3 Diploma in Journalism, Lucy has done stints at ITV, BBC Inside Out and Key 103. While working as a journalist for UNILAD, Lucy has reported on breaking news stories while also writing features about mental health, cervical screening awareness, and Little Mix (who she is unapologetically obsessed with).