Stellar Death by Black Hole
An artist's concept of a tidal disruption event (TDE), a stellar death that occurs when a star passes fatally close to a supermassive black hole. Recently, astronomers tracked a TDE occurring within the pair of colliding galaxies called Arp 299. The galaxies are nearly 150 million light-years from Earth. At the core of one of the galaxies, a black hole 20 million times more massive than the Sun shredded a star more than twice the Sun's mass. Theorists have suggested that material pulled from the doomed star forms a rotating disk around the black hole, emitting intense X-rays and visible light, and also launches jets of material outward from the poles of the disk at nearly the speed of light.
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Photo credit: © Science History Images / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: 299, accretion, arp, art, artwork, astronomic, astronomical, astronomy, black, c039/1668, colliding, death, disc, disruption, drawing, event, evolution, galactic, galaxies, galaxy, hole, illustration, physics, radiation, solar, star, stellar, supermassive, tde, tidal, universe, wind
