Newswise — What happens when a black hole has a star for dinner?
In this new video, Melissa Hoffman of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory takes us on a tour of one of the most disruptive events in Universe: a black hole ripping apart a nearby star.
Astronomers call these stellar deaths tidal disruption events, and only a few of them have been observed.
Using radio and infrared telescopes, including the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), in 2018 an international team of astronomers witnessed this event in a pair of colliding galaxies called Arp 299.
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