Astronomers Seppo Mattila and Miguel Pérez-Torres usually study the natural deaths of stars, but they weren’t going to pass up the chance to investigate a stellar murder.
A new paper in Science describes how they nabbed photographic evidence that a supermassive black hole in a relatively nearby galaxy tore apart and consumed part of a star in a phenomenon called a tidal disruption event (TDE), spewing jets of material in the process. Scientists have observed these cosmic crime scenes before, but this was the first time anyone managed to get such detailed images of the jets and their changing structure over time.
Scene of the Crime
At the ends of their natural lives, stars more massive than our sun explode as supernovae. Astronomers who study supernovae, like Mattila and Pérez-Torres, rely on catching these stellar fireworks by chance, but they can stack the odds in their favor by monitoring starburst galaxies, full of young, massive stars that could go supernova at any moment. Though a typical galaxy like our own Milky Way may only experience one supernova every 50-100 years, a starburst galaxy may get one every 3-4 years.
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