Huge Black Hole Thought to Have Ripped Star to Shreds

January 5th, 2010

Astronomers have observed that a star is no more. What they observed is that it didn’t die an ordinary death. New results from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Magellan telescopes (their stellar security cameras)suggest that a dense stellar remnant has been ripped apart by a black hole a thousand times as massive as the Sun.

If confirmed, this discovery would be a cosmic double play: it would be strong evidence for an intermediate mass black hole, which has been a hotly debated topic, and would mark the first time such a black hole has been caught tearing a star apart.

This scenario is based on Chandra observations, which revealed an unusually luminous source of X-rays in a dense cluster of old stars, and optical observations that showed a peculiar mix of elements associated with the X-ray emission. Taken together, a case can be made that the X-ray emission is produced by debris from a disrupted white dwarf star that is heated as it falls towards a massive black hole. The optical emission comes from debris further out that is illuminated by these X-rays. more