Scientists capture exact moment when Sun-sized star gets shredded by a giant black hole

Using advanced telescopes, scientists have captured the precise moment in which a supermassive black hole shredded a star by a process called 'spaghettification'. A rare blast of light from the star's last moments was spotted by researchers using European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT).

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, and has been studied in detail. The AT2019qiz was first spotted by Matt Nicholl, the new study's lead author, and a lecturer and Royal Astronomical Society research fellow at Britain's University of Birmingham.

"The idea of a black hole 'sucking in' a nearby star sounds like science fiction. But this is exactly what happens in a tidal disruption event," said Nicholl. 

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An unlucky star near a hungry monster

Such tidal disruption events, where a star experiences what's known as spaghettification as it's sucked in by a black hole, are rare and not always easy to study. The scientists pointed ESO VLT and ESO's New Technology Telescope (NTT) at a new flash of light that occurred last year close to a supermassive black hole, to investigate in detail what happens when a star is devoured by such a monster.

According to the study author Thomas Wevers, an ESO Fellow in Santiago, Chile, when an unlucky star wanders too close to a supermassive black hole in the centre of a galaxy, the extreme gravitational pull of the black hole shreds the star into thin streams of material. As some of the thin strands of stellar material fall into the black hole during this spaghettification process, a bright flare of energy is released, which astronomers can detect.

So far, astronomers have had trouble investigating this burst of light, which is often obscured by a curtain of dust and debris. Only now have astronomers been able to shed light on the origin of this curtain.

"We found that, when a black hole devours a star, it can launch a powerful blast of material outwards that obstructs our view," explains Samantha Oates, also at the University of Birmingham. This happens because the energy released as the black hole eats up stellar material propels the star's debris outwards.

The team carried out observations of AT2019qiz, located in a spiral galaxy in the constellation of Eridanus, over a 6-month period as the flare grew in luminosity and then faded away.

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