A black hole ‘assassin’ ripped a star to shreds and left its guts strewn about the galaxy

In a method, stars are like doughnuts: You need to rip them aside to see what’s inside. Fortunately for astronomers, typically the cosmos does simply that — when a black gap shreds a star that passes by too intently in a violent spectacle referred to as a tidal disruption occasion (TDE). (The phenomenon is extra whimsically referred to as “spaghettification”).

In new analysis printed in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomers used a TDE to exactly measure the quantities of sure components — specifically, nitrogen and carbon — round a black gap to deduce that an enormous star 3 times greater than the solar was destroyed there. That is the other drawback of guessing the doughnut’s filling; as an alternative, you see a smear of raspberry and powdered sugar and infer what got here earlier than the chaos.