Black Hole Lights Up Years After Ripping Star to Shreds – “We’ve Never Seen
Artist’s illustration of tidal disruption event AT2019dsg where a supermassive black hole spaghettifies and gobbles down a star. Some of the material is not consumed by the black hole and is flung back out into space. Credit: DESY, Science Communication Lab
A small star was ripped to shreds in October 2018 when it wandered too close to a black hole is lighting up the skies again. What makes that especially strange is that it hasn’t swallowed anything new, scientists say.
“It’s as if this black hole has started abruptly burping out a bunch of material from the star it ate years ago.” — Yvette Cendes
“This caught us completely by surprise — no one has ever seen anything like this before,” says Yvette Cendes. She is lead author of a new study analyzing the phenomenon and a research associate at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (spaghettified by black holes.
A Cloudy Twilight at the VLA. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF
Radio data from the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico revealed that the black hole had mysteriously reanimated in June 2021. Cendes and the team rushed to examine the event more closely.
“We applied for Director’s Discretionary Time on multiple telescopes, which is when you find something so unexpected, you can’t wait for the normal cycle of telescope proposals to observe it,” Cendes explains. “All the applications were immediately accepted.”
The team collected observations of the…
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