A group of astronomers from the UK and Chile (Nicholl et al.)
observed a very rare event which was one of the closest recorded so far. When a
star approaches close to a Super Massive Black Hole, due to extreme gravity an
event called Tidal disruption happens. During this event, the star shreds into
thin streams while being sucked inside the Blackhole. This is also termed as
Sphagettification. When these strands fall into the Blackhole, a bright flare
of energy is released along with the dust and debris of the star.
The astronomers led by Nicholl, a lecturer and Royal
Astronomical Society research fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK,
observed this event by ESO's (European Southern Observatory) Very Large
Telescope (VLT) and New Technology Telescope (NLT) in the constellation Eridanus
throughout the 6-month observation. They could observe a flash of light from a
star whose mass is almost the same as our sun when it fell into a Blackhole.
They observed these flashes in detail using UV, Optical, X-ray, radiofrequency,
etc. No such event was observed in the past as close to this event which was
named AT2019qiz. A lot of debris was also released along with the flashes and
this debris reached a velocity of over 10,000km/s. This research opens up to
study other such events happening near the Black Hole and help us in studying
Supermassive Black holes and how matter behaves in extreme gravitational
environments.
Reference
M Nicholl, T Wevers, S R Oates, K D Alexander, G Leloudas, F
Onori, A Jerkstrand, S Gomez, S Campana, I Arcavi, P Charalampopoulos, M
Gromadzki, N Ihanec, P G Jonker, A Lawrence, I Mandel, S Schulze, P Short, J
Burke, C McCully, D Hiramatsu, D A Howell, C Pellegrino, H Abbot, J P Anderson,
E Berger, P K Blanchard, G Cannizzaro, T-W Chen, M Dennefeld, L Galbany, S
González-Gaitán, G Hosseinzadeh, C Inserra, I Irani, P Kuin, T Müller-Bravo, J
Pineda, N P Ross, R Roy, S J Smartt, K W Smith, B Tucker, Ł Wyrzykowski, D R
Young. An outflow powers the optical rise of the nearby, fast-evolving tidal
disruption event AT2019qiz. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society,
2020; 499 (1): 482 DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staa2824
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