NASA | JPL-Caltech | WISE | 2016 Sep 15
[img3="This illustration shows a glowing stream of material from a star as it is being devoured by a supermassive black hole in a tidal disruption flare. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech"]http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/wise/201 ... 027-16.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]Supermassive black holes, with their immense gravitational pull, are notoriously good at clearing out their immediate surroundings by eating nearby objects. When a star passes within a certain distance of a black hole, the stellar material gets stretched and compressed -- or "spaghettified" -- as the black hole swallows it.
A black hole destroying a star, an event astronomers call "stellar tidal disruption," releases an enormous amount of energy, brightening the surroundings in an event called a flare. In recent years, a few dozen such flares have been discovered, but they are not well understood.
Astronomers now have new insights into tidal disruption flares, thanks to data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Two new studies characterize tidal disruption flares by studying how surrounding dust absorbs and re-emits their light, like echoes. This approach allowed scientists to measure the energy of flares from stellar tidal disruption events more precisely than ever before. ...
Discovery of Transient Infrared Emission from Dust Heated by Stellar Tidal Disruption Flares - Sjoert van Velzen et al
- Astrophysical Journal 829(1):19 (20 Sep 2016) DOI: 10.3847/0004-637X/829/1/19
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1605.04304 > 13 May 2016 (v1), 13 Sep 2016 (v2)