From Ideas Inventions and Innovations:
A five-year analysis of an event captured by a tiny telescope at McDonald Observatory and followed up by telescopes on the ground and in space has led astronomers to believe they witnessed a giant black hole tear apart a star. The work is published this month in The Astrophysical Journal.
When a star encounters a black hole, tidal forces stretch the star into an elongated blob before tearing it apart, as seen in these images from a computer simulation by James Guillochon of Harvard University.
On Jan. 21, 2009, the ROTSE IIIb telescope at McDonald caught the flash of an extremely bright event. The telescope’s wide field of view takes pictures of large swathes of sky every night, looking for newly exploding stars as part of the ROTSE Supernova Verification Project (RSVP). Software then compares successive photos to find bright “new” objects in the sky — transient events such as the explosion of a star or a gamma-ray burst.
With a magnitude of -22.5, this 2009 event was as bright as the “superluminous supernovae” (a new category of the brightest stellar explosions known) that the ROTSE team discovered at McDonald in recent years. The team nicknamed the 2009 event “Dougie,” after a character in the cartoon “South Park.” (Its technical name is ROTSE3J120847.9+430121.)...MUCH MORE
