Science: With Halloween approaching, it’s the perfect timing for a horror movie and NASA’s Chandra Space Telescope has spotted an amazing one. The X-ray telescope spotted a cosmic serial killer ruthlessly ripping apart a star and then targeting its next stellar victim. Like a cosmic Michael Myers, the unstoppable killer of the Halloween horror franchise, the supermassive black hole in a galaxy 210 million light-years from Earth is a master of bloody destruction. The black hole at the center of AT2019qiz is throwing the remains of the star it previously destroyed onto another star or possibly a smaller stellar-mass black hole orbiting around it.
This stellar horror movie was first spotted by the Zwicky Transient Facility, which observed the violent death of a star caused by the gravitational effect of this black hole in a so-called “tidal disruption event” or “TDE” in 2019. Like all the best horror movies, astronomers were eager to see the sequel, with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope, Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and other telescopes eager to catch the next installment in 2023. This new installment of this gruesome tale involved the remains of the destroyed star, which have settled like a graveyard around this deadly black hole, forming a flattened cloud of stellar material.
This stellar debris has spread to such an extent that an orbiting object repeatedly collides with it while revolving around AT2019qiz’s supermassive black hole. These collisions cause the X-ray flashes seen by Chandra. “Imagine a diver repeatedly going into the pool and splashing every time he enters the water,” team leader Matt Nicholl of Queen’s University Belfast in the United Kingdom said in a statement. “In this comparison the star is like the diver, and the disk is the pool, and every time the star hits the surface, it creates a giant ‘splash’ of gas and X-rays. As the star orbits around the black hole, it does this over and over again.”
