In the Universe, some encounters end badly.
A rather ordinary star paid the price, when its trajectory brought it a little too close to a supermassive black hole in the heart of a distant galaxy.
The gravitational giant, heavy as the equivalent of 500 million times our Sun, literally tore the star, part of which ended up being swallowed by the black hole.
This violent digestion caused powerful jets of material ejected at a speed close to the speed of light.
An exceptional event described by a large international collaboration of astronomers in two articles published in the journals
Nature
and
Nature Astronomy
.
To discover
OUR FILE - Tobacco: how to get out of it?
It all starts with an automatic alert launched in February by the ZTF observatory, the Zwicky Transient Facility, installed on Mount Palomar in California.
The instrument, a telescope 1.20 m in diameter, constantly observes large areas of the sky in search of the slightest rapid change in brightness.
These events…
This article is for subscribers only.
You have 81% left to discover.
Pushing back the limits of science is also freedom.
Keep reading your article for €0.99 for the first month
I ENJOY IT
Already subscribed?
Login
