An Unlucky Star’s Fatal Encounter with a Black Hole

Posted by Guy Pirro | 09/22/2021 12:23AM | 0 Comments

When a star ventures too close to a black hole, gravitational forces create intense tides that break the star apart into a stream of gas, resulting in a cataclysmic phenomenon known as a Tidal Disruption Event (TDE). Tremendous amounts of energy are released, causing the tidal disruption to outshine the combined light of every star in the black hole's host galaxy for months, and even years. By analyzing observations of an X-ray flare and fitting the data with theoretical models, University of Arizona astronomers have documented a fatal encounter between an unlucky star and an intermediate-mass black hole and have been able to make the first measurements of both the black hole's mass and spin.