Milky Way The galaxy in which Earth’s solar system resides. Anything on Earth with matter will have a property described as "weight." Matter Something that occupies space and has mass. The total distance they now span would equal one light-year. Now lay another 236 million more that are the same length, end-to-end, right after the first. It would be a little over 40,000 kilometers (24,900 miles) long. To get some idea of this length, imagine a rope long enough to wrap around the Earth. Light year The distance light travels in one year, about 9.48 trillion kilometers (almost 6 trillion miles). The more mass that something has, the greater its gravity. Gravity The force that attracts anything with mass, or bulk, toward any other thing with mass. Galaxies, which each typically include between 10 million and 100 trillion stars, also include clouds of gas, dust and the remnants of exploded stars. Galaxy A massive group of stars bound together by gravity. ![]() Friction generally causes a heating, which can damage a surface of some material as it rubs against another. People who work in this field are known as astrophysicists.īlack hole A region of space having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation (including light) can escape.Įxoplanet Short for extrasolar planet, it’s a planet that orbits a star outside our solar system.įriction The resistance that one surface or object encounters when moving over or through another material (such as a fluid or a gas). “This star died, but we’re able to use its death to learn about the universe.”Īccretion disk A ring or flattened plane of gas, plasma or dust (or other materials) that orbits a celestial object, and loses some energy and speed as gravity causes this material to slowly spiral in toward the object it surrounds.Īstronomer A scientist who performs research involving celestial objects, space and the physical universe.Īstrophysics An area of astronomy that deals with understanding the physical nature of stars and other objects in space. One lingering question is whether this type of star-shredding activity plays a part in how galaxies change over time. These data also could help answer how black holes form, Holoien adds. Such observations could also improve estimates of how quickly black holes spin, Stone says. But in reality, they can power some of the brightest sources of light in the universe.” More early observations of tidal disruption events could help physicists improve estimates of the masses of black holes. “It’s a little paradoxical,” Stone says, “because you think of black holes as dark objects. It heats up to hundreds of thousands or even millions of degrees Celsius. As it orbits the black hole, the gas rubs against itself. But it still behaves like a fluid,” Stone explains. The swirling material is “superheated, interstellar gas. As a theoretical astrophysicist, Stone uses computer simulations to study objects in space. But he collaborates with one of the paper’s authors. He works in Israel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The accretion disk is like “water circling the drain of a bathtub,” explains Nicholas Stone. Scientists had never caught a TDE so early. The episode is called a tidal disruption event, or TDE. This animation illustrates what happens when a star strays too near a black hole: It gets torn apart. In the end, it formed a spiraling ring of glowing, hot gas. The rest looped around the black hole, crashing into itself. This is called “spaghettification.” Some of the shredded stellar guts were spit back into space. Eventually the star was stretched into a long strand of gas. If such an event happened in the Milky Way, it would be so bright that it could probably be seen during the day.Īs the star was drawn in by the black hole, it was pulled apart by the black hole’s intense gravity. ![]() “So this was outshining every other star in its galaxy,” Holoien says. A typical galaxy contains around a billion or 10 billion stars. ![]() It released about 30 billion times the energy of our sun. That’s the earliest observation of a tidal disruption event yet. He’s an astronomer at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif. “We were able to see exactly when it started to get brighter,” says Thomas Holoien. It showed the stellar material brightening as it began circling the black hole. These are planets that orbit stars outside of Earth’s solar system. The flare came from a galaxy around 375 million light-years from Earth.Īs it happened, that patch of sky also was being watched by NASA’s TESS satellite. Researchers then turned to other instruments for a better look. These are violent explosions that mark the death of massive stars. They had been searching the sky for supernovas. The first clues that scientists saw from ASASSN-19bt came from robotic telescopes.
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