Astronomers have observed a black hole tearing apart a massive star in an extreme event that researchers say was unlike anything they had seen before, according to ScienceDaily. The phenomenon, nicknamed the Whippet and formally labeled AT2024wpp, was presented at the AAS conference in Phoenix.
Lead author Daniel Perley of Liverpool John Moores University said the black hole shredded a massive companion star into a disk that fed the black hole. Researchers described the encounter as one of the most powerful cosmic events ever recorded, briefly releasing about 400 billion times the energy output of the Sun.
Anna Ho of Cornell University spotted the object with the Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory. Within a day, follow-up observations from the Liverpool Telescope and NASA’s Swift satellite showed it was extremely blue and producing X-rays, matching the hallmarks of a rare Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transient.
Researchers concluded that the event involved a star being ripped apart and swallowed by a black hole. Later observations found that a shock wave moved outward through dense gas before apparently fading after about six months, while material from the star formed a hot disk around the black hole and drove powerful outflows.
One unresolved detail is a weak helium signal that appeared as the event faded. According to the researchers, it may indicate that a dense structure survived the initial destruction, though they also said another explanation is possible.
