Black Hole Sun Won’t You Come
Ohio State Astronomers Capture Black Hole Shredding Star
Conditions have to be just right for a black hole to tear apart a star. The star can’t be too close that it just gets sucked up, or too far that it bounces off and spins out into the galaxy.
Thanks to a NASA satellite tasked with searching space for new planets, working with a network of telescopes headquartered at Ohio State called ASAS-SN, researchers got an unexpected glimpse of those perfect conditions.
Researchers say the supermassive black hole involved weighs approximately 6 million times the mass of the Sun, and sits at the center of a galaxy about 375 million light-years away in the Volans constellation. The star itself was similar in size to the Sun.