comic | episodes & e-books | store | about
< previous post | next post > | all news from Dec. 2016 News archive | News search | RSS
 
  Supermassive black hole killed ASASSN star?Dec 13, 2016 8:48 PM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Black hole news! Last year, a light source, dubbed "ASASSN-15lh" ("All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae"), was attributed to "the brightest supernova ever seen" (this would have qualified as a hypernova) by American scientists who studied it. But a new BBC article says that British scientists who've been studying the burst of light since then say it was most likely emitted by a star being apart by a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy: falling in too close to the black hole, the star "spaghettified and some of the material was converted into huge amounts of radiated light." The black hole would have been spinning rapidly, and the star fairly small. This type of "tidal disruption" event by a black hole on a star—if that's indeed what it was—has only been observed on about 10 occasions by science.
 
The scientists also mention Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, although not by name; somewhat curiously, they give its mass as "one million times the mass of the Sun," rather than the usually stated ~4 million.
 
 
 
 
·····
 
 
 
 
 
< previous post | next post > | all news from Dec. 2016 News archive | News search | RSS
 
© Copyright 2024 Ben Chamberlain. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy