![]() ![]() In ASASSN-14li, astronomers were able to witness the formation of such a disk by looking at the X-ray light at different wavelengths (known as the “X-ray spectrum”) and tracking how that changed over time. But how this process starts has remained a mystery. Gas often falls toward black holes by spiraling inward in a disk. In the case of ASASSN-14li, astronomers estimate the mass of the black hole is a few million times that of the Sun. The amount of light should decline as the disrupted material falls onto the black hole, shown as the small black circle in the upper left of the illustration. Theory predicts that early in the evolution of a tidal disruption, material from the shredded star (seen as the reddish-orange streak) should be pulled towards the black hole at a high rate, generating a huge amount of light. The event was discovered in an optical search by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) in November 2014. This makes this tidal disruption, dubbed ASASSN-14li, the closest tidal disruption discovered in ten years. This event, known as a “tidal disruption,” is depicted in the artist’s illustration.Īstronomers used a trio of X-ray telescopes – NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Swift Gamma Ray Burst Explorer, and ESA’s XMM-Newton – to observe a tidal disruption located in the center of a galaxy about 290 million light years away. ![]() Astronomers have observed material being blown away from a black hole after it tore a star apart.
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