It’s been a big year for black holes. Back in April, NASA gave us our first direct glimpse of an existentially terrifying gravitational event, and now, the agency has gotten another look at what one can do to a star much like our own sun.
NASA announced this week that Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (or TESS) managed to spot what’s called a tidal disruption event. In layman’s terms, that’s when a star gets a little too close to a black hole and, well, it stops being a star after that.
There’s a lot of fun space lingo at play here. NASA is calling the event ASASSN-19bt, named after the ASAS-SN telescope network that first noticed the tidal disruption back in January. Once the star got close enough to the black hole, it experienced something known as “spaghettification,” which is when an object encounters gravity so powerful that it gets stretched out like noodles. Read more…
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