AsianScientist (Aug. 11, 2011) – An international team of astronomers has observed a star being literally torn apart after it had strayed too close to a super massive black hole. Such an event is incredibly rare, and it occurs once every 10,000 years per galaxy.

The team was led by Dr. Dacheng Lin, who first detected this star in 2006 through the European Space Agency’s X-ray Telescope, XXM-Newton.

In 2007, while researching archival data, the team noticed a bright flare, which they identified as the signature of a star being ripped apart in a galaxy 500 million light years away.

Using NASA’s SWIFT X-ray Telescope in February this year, Lin observed the area again and found that the flare had dimmed significantly.

“Dr. Lin’s research raised the possibility that we had indeed stumbled onto a very rare extreme event,” said team member Dr. Sean Farrell of the University of Sydney. “Of course, when we realized that the star had been obliterated because it had gone too close to a super massive black hole, we knew what we had observed was something even more extraordinary,” he said.

Super massive black holes have been theoretically predicted by theories Einstein wrote in 1915, but little is known about them.

This discovery will be important for testing theories on gravity, and help astronomers understand how super massive black holes grow and “feed.”

The article can be found at: Lin D et al. (2011) Discovery of an Ultrasoft X-ray Transient Source in the 2XMM Catalog: a Tidal Disruption Event Candidate.

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Source: University of Sydney.

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