MacDonald Observatory | University of Texas | 2015 Jan 26
A five-year analysis of an event captured by a tiny telescope at McDonald Observatory and followed up by telescopes on the ground and in space has led astronomers to believe they witnessed a giant black hole tear apart a star. The work is published this month in The Astrophysical Journal.Click to play embedded YouTube video.
On January 21, 2009, the ROTSE IIIb telescope at McDonald caught the flash of an extremely bright event. The telescope’s wide field of view takes pictures of large swathes of sky every night, looking for newly exploding stars as part of the ROTSE Supernova Verification Project (RSVP). Software then compares successive photos to find bright “new” objects in the sky — transient events like the explosion of a star or a gamma-ray burst.
With a magnitude of -22.5, this 2009 event was as bright as the “superluminous supernovae” (a new category of the brightest stellar explosions known) that the ROTSE team discovered at McDonald in recent years. The team nicknamed the 2009 event “Dougie,” after a character in the cartoon South Park. (Its technical name is ROTSE3J120847.9+430121.)
The team thought Dougie might be a supernova, and set about looking for its host galaxy (which would be much too faint for ROTSE to see). They found that the Sloan Digital Sky Survey had mapped a faint red galaxy at Dougie’s location. The team followed that up with new observations of the galaxy with one of the giant Keck telescopes in Hawaii, pinpointing the galaxy’s distance at three billion light-years. ...
A Luminous, Fast Rising UV-Transient Discovered by ROTSE: a Tidal Disruption Event? - J. Vinko et al
- Astrophysical Journal 798(1) 12 (2015 Jan 01) DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/798/1/12
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1410.6014 > 22 Oct 2014 (v1), 31 Oct 2014 (v2)