Astronomers see a star ‘spaghettified’ by a black hole
Deborah Byrd in SPACE | October 13, 2020
Astronomers have spotted a rare blast of light from a star being ripped apart by a supermassive black hole. The phenomenon – known as a tidal disruption event – is the closest such flare recorded to date at just over 215 million light-years from Earth.
Deborah Byrd in SPACE | October 13, 2020
Astronomers have spotted a rare blast of light from a star being ripped apart by a supermassive black hole. The phenomenon – known as a tidal disruption event – is the closest such flare recorded to date at just over 215 million light-years from Earth.
It must be wonderful for astronomers when a concept they learned about in school as theory is seen in the real universe. That’s happened a lot in recent decades, but nowhere so interestingly as on Monday, October 12, 2020, when astronomers announced they’ve witnessed a star undergoing spaghettification. That is, the star is being ripped apart as it falls into a supermassive black hole, in a galaxy only 215 million light-years away. They didn’t see the star up close as it was being shredded; our earthly technologies don’t extend that far. But they did capture the star’s last moments, just before it was ripped apart by the black hole, in what astronomers call a tidal disruption event. The event created a flare of light, which they said is the closest such flare recorded to date.
Spaghettification is sometimes called the noodle effect. We in astronomy have long heard about the intrepid astronaut who ventured too near a black hole’s event horizon (the point beyond which no light can escape) and was “stretched like spaghetti” by the hole’s powerful gravity. It’s not just that the hole’s gravity is strong. It’s that – because gravity is inversely proportional to distance, and because a black hole’s gravity is so exceedingly strong – the pull on the falling astronaut’s legs is substantially greater than the pull on his or her upper torso. Thus – as the astronaut approaches the event horizon, the point of no return (assuming they’re falling in feet first) – the astronaut is vertically stretched, as illustrated in the image below, until at last disappearing (again feet first) over the event horizon. This is spaghettification.
