Note to stars: When circling a black hole, exercise caution. Stray too close and something unfortunate might happen. See accompanying illustration for details.
In spring 2010, NASA’s orbiting Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the ground-based Pan-STARRS telescope observed a suspicious brightening around a supermassive black hole parked more than 2 billion light-years from Earth. Over the next few months, the flare continued increasing in brightness — then it dimmed. Scientists now suggest that the light show was evidence of the black hole PS1-10jh shredding a star that wandered too close to the bruiser’s gravitational jaws.
An astronomical crime scene analysis presented online May 2 in Nature indicates that at the time of engulfment, the star was just a helium-rich core, the remainder of a former red giant. The black hole, a bulked-up behemoth weighing about 3 million solar masses, had probably already snacked on the star’s outer layers during a previous close encounter.
As it slowly ingested the star, the black hole spat some of the stellar material into space. The star-crumbs, visible in this computer simulation, followed elongated orbits that eventually dumped them back into the black hole, producing the observed, months-long flare.
Such disruption events are rare, thought to occur only once every 10,000 years per galaxy — and can help astronomers spot otherwise hidden black holes.
