A black hole ripped apart a star and brought together astronomers from around the world
by Georgina Torbet from The Verge - All Posts on (#66D4B)
An artist's impression of a tidal disruption event. | Image: Carl Knox - OzGrav, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, Swinburne University of Technology It was an event not seen in more than a decade: a sudden flash of energy launched out from the center of a distant galaxy, bright enough to be visible from 8.5 billion light-years away. With a burst of light equivalent to more than 1,000 trillion suns, the flash was first detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility, a survey of the entire night sky conducted from the Palomar Observatory in California.
On Valentine's Day this year, we found a source that was puzzling. It was just weird!" Igor Andreoni of the University of Maryland, lead author of one of two papers about the event, told The Verge. And weird is good in science. It means it's something you can learn from."
Within days, astronomers around the world turned their telescopes...