Astronomers capture black hole causing the ‘spaghettification’ of a star

By Mark Waghorn via SWNS

A star being shredded by a black hole 850 million light years from Earth has been captured by astronomers.

The burst of light was caused by 'spaghettification' as gravity transformed it into a long, noodle-like string.

It is an incredibly rare phenomenon known as a tidal disruption event. In the Milky Way, they occur up to once every 100,000 years.

The discovery sheds fresh light on supermassive black holes - and their effect on surrounding matter.

Co-author Dr. Ryan Foley, of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), said: "It has created widespread excitement.

"We can use tidal disruption events not only to find more intermediate-mass black holes in quiet dwarf galaxies but also to measure their masses."

The black hole is intermediate in size - about 100,000 solar masses. Very few have been found to date.

They are not as large as those at the center of galaxies but bigger than ones caused by supernovae.

The dead star has got tightly wound like spaghetti around a fork to form a ball of hot plasma.

First author Dr. Charlotte Angus, of the University of Copenhagen, said: "The fact we were able to capture this midsize black hole whilst it devoured a star offered us a remarkable opportunity to detect what otherwise would have been hidden from us.

"What is more, we can use the properties of the flare itself to better understand this elusive group of middle-weight black holes, which could account for the majority of black holes in the centers of galaxies."

They are millions or billions of times the mass of the sun. There is one at the heart of the Milky Way.

It is believed they may grow from smaller ones - like that detected by the international team using space and ground-based telescopes.

Hubble's ultraviolet camera imaged a ring of stars being born around the nucleus of the dwarf galaxy where the black hole is located.

One theory is the early universe was rampant with smaller cities of stars and black holes.

Over eons, they would have been gobbled up by bigger galaxies - their cores combining each time to build up the mass in the center.

This merger process would eventually create the supermassive black holes we see today.

Co-author Professor Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, also from UCSC, said: "If we can understand the population of intermediate-mass black holes out there - how many there are and where they are located - we can help determine if our theories of supermassive black hole formation are correct."

But it is difficult to know if all dwarf galaxies have midsize black holes because identifying them is extremely challenging, he explained.

Classic hunting techniques, which look for actively feeding black holes, are often not sensitive enough.

As a result, only a minuscule fraction of dwarf galaxies are known to host them. Finding more with tidal disruption events could settle the debate about how supermassive black holes form.

Co-author Professor Vivienne Baldassare, of Washington State University, said: "One of the biggest open questions in astronomy is currently how supermassive black holes form."

The study in Nature Astronomy used data from a star survey called the Young Supernova Experiment (YSE).

It enabled the detection of the first signs of light as the black hole began eating the star.
This initial moment was pivotal as duration can measure the mass.

Dr. Angus added: "This flare was incredibly fast, but because our YSE data gave us so much early information about the event, we were really able to pin down the mass of the black hole using it."