Astronomers comparing maps of the universe uncovered the nearest example of a black hole devouring a star ever detected.
A long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away, a supermassive black hole ripped a star to shreds in the center of the galaxy NGC 7392. The flash of light from the black hole's dinner finally reached Earth in 2014 — and astronomers just discovered it in their data.
This newly detected outburst from the center of NGC 7392 is the closest-yet example of a tidal disruption event , where a star is pulled apart by the massive gravitational pull of a black hole. The findings were published April 28 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The hungry black hole was spotted roughly 137 million light-years from Earth — or about 35 million times as far as Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the sun. As distant as that sounds, astronomers have only observed around 100 of these events so far, and this one is four times closer than the previous title-holder of"closest TDE to Earth.
After first spotting the TDE in observations from the NEOWISE space telescope, Panagiotou and collaborators sifted through data from many other observatories and space telescopes to dig up more information on NGC 7392's supermassive black hole. They wanted to solve the mystery of why this TDE only appeared in infrared, instead of in more energetic wavelengths like others of its kind.
By looking for TDEs in infrared too, scientists could get one step closer to understanding how black holes chow down on stars.
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