For the first time, in 2019, a black hole was observed destroying a star from start to finish. Details and video from NASA
For the first time, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) saw a black hole tear a star apart from start to finish, a catastrophic phenomenon called a “tidal disruption event.” The supermassive black hole which generated the event has an estimated mass equal to about 6 million times the mass of the Sun and is located at the center of a galaxy called 2masx j07001137-6602251 located approximately 375 million light years away in the direction of the constellation of the Flying Fish.
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ASASSN-19bt
The explosion, called ASASSN-19btwas discovered on January 29, 2019 by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN), a worldwide network of 20 telescopes. Shortly after the discovery, ASAS-SN requested further observations from NASA’s Swift satellite, ESA’s (European Space Agency) XMM-Newton and ground-based telescopes from 1 metro in the global network of the Las Cumbres Observatory. This video shows the ASASSN-19bt event captured by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and Swift, along with an animation illustrating how it occurred. Because ASASSN-19bt occurred in TESS’s continuous observation zone, the satellite observed the entire duration of the event.
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Cover image credit NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
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