Supermassive Black Hole Shreds a Star, and You Get to Watch

Imag­ine a star (like our sun) wan­der­ing close to a super­mas­sive black hole and find­ing itself mer­ci­less­ly ripped apart by this beast weigh­ing mil­lions to bil­lions times more than the hap­less star. It does­n’t hap­pen very often. But when it hap­pens, it’s pret­ty spec­tac­u­lar. And now NASA has pro­duced a com­put­er sim­u­la­tion show­ing this spec­ta­cle, draw­ing on evi­dence gath­ered by NASA’s Galaxy Evo­lu­tion Explor­er and the Pan-STARRS1 tele­scope locat­ed in Hawaii. Here’s how NASA describes what you’re see­ing in the clip above:

Some of the stel­lar debris falls into the black hole and some of it is eject­ed into space at high speeds. The areas in white are regions of high­est den­si­ty, with pro­gres­sive­ly red­der col­ors cor­re­spond­ing to low­er-den­si­ty regions. The blue dot pin­points the black hole’s loca­tion. The elapsed time cor­re­sponds to the amount of time it takes for a Sun-like star to be ripped apart by a black hole a mil­lion times more mas­sive than the Sun.

NASA has more infor­ma­tion on this stel­lar homi­cide here.

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