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NASA’s TESS Mission Finds Eerie Star-Shredding Black Hole

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NASA's TESS planet-hunting mission observed its first star-shredding black hole. (Photo Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)

NASA’s planet-hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has observed a black hole ripping apart a star for the first time.

The star-destroying occurrence, which involved a cataclysmic phenomenon dubbed a tidal disruption event, was noticed by TESS on January 21. Follow-up observations by NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and other skywatching facilities have created the most detailed view of the early moments of this turbulent, tidal disruption event. A paper detailing researchers’ findings was published in The Astrophysical Journal on Thursday.

“TESS data let us see exactly when this destructive event, named ASASSN-19bt, started to get brighter, which we’ve never been able to do before. Because we identified the tidal disruption quickly with the ground-based All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN), we were able to trigger multi-wavelength follow-up observations in the first few days,” said Thomas Holoien, a Carnegie Fellow at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California. “The early data will be incredibly helpful for modeling the physics of these outbursts.”

When TESS first spotted ASASSN-19bt earlier this year, it took over a week before the event was bright enough for ASAS-SN, a worldwide network of 20 robotic telescopes at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, to detect it, NASA said in a press release. The satellite only transmits data to our planet every 14 days and once received, the information has to be processed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. The first TESS data on the tidal disruption event was not available until March 13. Fortunately, the tidal disruption took place in TESS’s southern continuous viewing zone and ASASSN-19bt’s location enabled Holoien and his team to monitor the event across many sectors.

“The early TESS data allow us to see light very close to the black hole, much closer than we’ve been able to see before,” said Patrick Vallely from OSU. “They also show us that ASASSN-19bt’s rise in brightness was very smooth, which helps us tell that the event was a tidal disruption and not another type of outburst, like from the center of a galaxy or a supernova.”

Holoien and his colleagues used UV data from Swift to determine that the temperature decreased by roughly 50 percent, from roughly 71,500 to 35,500 degrees Fahrenheit, over a few days. According to Holoien, it’s the first time an early temperature decrease has been observed in a tidal disruption, even though a few theories have predicted this activity.

Astronomers believe that the supermassive black hole that produced ASASSN-19bt weighs approximately six million times the sun’s mass and it sits at the heart of a galaxy called  2MASX J07001137-6602251, which is located around 375 million light-years away in the constellation Volans.

According to NASA, tidal disruptions don’t occur often, and they take place once every 10,000 to 100,000 years in a galaxy that’s equal in size to the Milky Way. Astronomers have observed only roughly 40 tidal disruptions so far and some scientists predicted that TESS would only see maybe one or two during its initial 24-month mission. Scientists are still trying to determine why tidal disruptions produce a lot of UV emission and only a handful of X-rays.

“For TESS to observe ASASSN-19bt so early in its tenure, and in the continuous viewing zone where we could watch it for so long, is really quite extraordinary,” said Padi Boyd, the TESS project scientist at Goddard. “Future collaborations with observatories around the world and in orbit will help us learn even more about the different outbursts that light up the cosmos.”

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