Through the European Southern Observatory (ESO), a team of astronomers captured a rare event 215 million light-years from Earth: a star destroyed by a supermassive black hole. The phenomenon, known as “tidal disruption,” also know as AT 2019qiz, causes the stars to stretch like spaghetti, and this is the closest one ever observed.
The event was captured through various telescopes, including ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the New Technology Telescope (NTT).
It has not been easy to observe these events in the past: when a black hole absorbs a star, it tends to throw up material and produces so much dust that it obscures the field of view. On this occasion, however, the event could be studied and observed for six months before the star turned into strips.
The team of astronomers estimated that the star had a mass similar to that of our Sun. Compared to the size of the supermassive black hole, which has a mass more than a million times that of our Sun, the star could not escape and generated what’s known as the spaghetti effect. The AT 2019qiz investigation also enables us to understand about the movement of matter in extreme environments around supermassive black holes, as noted by specialists in Monthly Notices from the Royal Astronomical Society.
