Star ‘squeezed like toothpaste tube’ by supermassive black hole in cosmic show
Tidal disruption event causing a star to be destroped by a supermassive black hole. Picture: Carl Knox/OzGrav, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery/Swinburne University of Technolog
An “extraordinary flash” seen in the sky earlier this year was caused by a distant star being “squeezed like a toothpaste tube” by a supermassive black hole, astronomers have said.
In what experts describe as one of the most violent events in the universe, the unlucky star met its fate after wandering too close to this black hole, sparking a light show bright enough — with more light than a thousand trillion suns — to be detected by instruments on Earth.
