NASA Satellite Spots Black Hole Shredding Star

Looking up at a clear night sky filled with millions of stars is an incredible experience that's sparked the imagination and curiosity of millions as people wonder exactly what's happening out in deep space.

NASA has provided us with one terrifyingly cool answer after releasing video of a supermassive black hole in a galaxy millions of light-years away shredding a star very similar to our own. The incredible footage of the "cataclysmic phenomenon" was captured by the planet-hunting satellite launching last year, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS.

Scientists believe that the supermassive black hole weighs approximately 6 million times our own sun's mass, and is located around 375 million light-years away in a galaxy similar to the Milky Way in the constellation Volans. Scientists believe the star destroyed in the video was around the size of our own sun. Tidal disruptions of stars are incredibly rare events, only occurring in a galaxies like the Milky Way once every 10,000 to 100,000 years.

“The early TESS data allow us to see light very close to the black hole, much closer than we’ve been able to see before,” said Patrick Vallely, a co-author and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at OSU. “They also show us that ASASSN-19bt’s rise in brightness was very smooth, which helps us tell that the event was a tidal disruption and not another type of outburst, like from the center of a galaxy or a supernova.”

Tidal disruptions occur thanks to the incredibly strong gravity surrounding supermassive black holes. When stars get too close, the gravity creates intense tides that break the star apart into streams of gas. The stream then breaks away from the black hole while other parts of the star orbit the black hole, creating a halo of debris. NASA demonstrates how tidal disruptions work in the video below:

The event, dubbed ASASSN-19bt, was first observed on Jan. 29 by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae telescope network, a network of 24 telescopes across the world that is headquartered at Ohio State University. Scientists quickly turned to TESS so they could get a better look at the event and fortunately, the satellite was already observing the area.

“TESS data let us see exactly when this destructive event, named ASASSN-19bt, started to get brighter, which we’ve never been able to do before,” said Thomas Holoien, a Carnegie Fellow at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California. “Because we identified the tidal disruption quickly with the ground-based All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN), we were able to trigger multi-wavelength follow-up observations in the first few days. The early data will be incredibly helpful for modeling the physics of these outbursts.”

Scientists have only been able to observe about 40 tidal disruptions with TESS capturing this one, shortly after its launch in April 2018.

“For TESS to observe (the event) so early in its tenure, and in the continuous viewing zone where we could watch it for so long, is really quite extraordinary,” said Padi Boyd, TESS project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“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.”

Photo: MIT