Astronomers call it "spaghettification," and it's not a pretty idea: It's what happens when you venture too close to a black hole and fall in. Tidal forces stretch you and break you like a noodle, then your shreds circle the black hole until they collide and knock each other in.
In a case reported last week , it was merely an anonymous star in a faraway galaxy that met its doom. Thanks to luck and ever-increasing vigilance of the heavens, the whole world was watching as the star went down.
Quite a lot has been going on:
What is Spaghettification? | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine
When black holes slurp up stars, they make a mess on a galactic scale. Now, astronomers have gotten the best look yet at a black hole swallowing a star, called a tidal disruption event. The details were published on October 12 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society .
In 2019, astronomers at the Zwicky Transient Facility in California saw a flare pop up in a galaxy in the constellation Eridanus, Dennis Overbye reports for the New York Times . A star near the size of our sun had fallen too close to the galaxy’s central black hole, and the intense gravity had begun stretching, squishing and shredding the star into stellar noodles.
'Spider's web' traps six galaxies around supermassive black hole | Space
Six galaxies were trapped in orbit around a supermassive black hole during the early history of the universe, new observations reveal.
The new data from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and other observatories gives astronomers a sense of black hole evolution when the universe was less than a billion years old, according to an ESO statement .
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One mystery of supermassive black holes is how they got so large, some containing billions of times the mass of the sun . Supermassive black holes are also relatively common; they lurk at the hearts of most, if not all, galaxies, including our own Milky Way. The new observations give fuel to the idea that such black holes grow in gassy environments within "large, web-like structures," according to ESO.
Accretion, not colliding spaghetti, flares up as star is devoured by black hole – Physics
An extremely bright flare, originating from a star being devoured by a supermassive black hole, has been observed in a galaxy 215 million light-years away – making this the nearest tidal disruption event (TDE) ever seen. The event was spotted by an international team of astronomers, headed by Matt Nicholl at the University of Birmingham. They caught the event well before its climax using instruments at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile.
If a star wanders too close to the supermassive black hole at the centre of its galaxy, it can experience tidal forces that exceed the gravitational forces holding the star together. As a result, the star will be dramatically shredded into thin streams of debris, through the process of spaghettification. During these TDEs, stellar remnants will flare, emitting large amounts of light.
Not to change the topic here:
Physicists keep trying to break the rules of gravity but this supermassive black hole just said
That image of the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy M87 was the first direct observation of a black hole's shadow — the imprint of the event horizon, a sphere around the black hole's singularity from which no light can escape. Einstein's theory predicts the size of the event horizon based on the mass of the black hole; and in April 2019, it was already clear that the shadow fits general relativity's prediction pretty well.
But no test is perfect. Watch how the sun's gravity tugs Mercury along its orbit, and you can measure general relativity in action. But telescopes can't measure the movement of Mercury down to the nanometer. And other forces — the tug of Jupiter's gravity, and Earth's gravity and the force solar wind, to name just a few — impact Mercury's movement in ways that are difficult to separate from the effects of relativity.
The Last Laugh: The Lighter Side of The Black Hole
A recent photo of Tony Wade superimposed on a shot of the field at the Oakland Coliseum. (Courtesy photo)
Fairfielder Floyd Gripman had a letter to the editor published last week decrying the lack of coverage by the Daily Republic of the Raiders after their huge win Oct. 11 against the Kansas City Chiefs.
First, I want to high-five my fellow Raiders fan Floyd for speaking out. Look, this ain’t a new thing. Going back decades there’s been an anti-Raiders bias in these here parts.
Spagettification: When An Object Comes Too Close To A Black Hole | KJZZ
What do you know about "spaghettification?" It doesn't involve pasta or Play-Doh — it's what happens when any body of matter gets too close to a black hole.
Astronomer Edo Berger with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics explained the rationale behind the term's name.
"It is called spaghettification because the tidal forces from the black hole essentially stretch any object that gets near it into a spaghetti shape," Berger said. "And so, essentially what happens to the star is it comes close in, and it gets stretched out and torn apart into these long strands that look like spaghetti."
NICK STROBEL: Black hole breakthroughs prove prize-worthy | Entertainment | bakersfield.com
Black holes were the subject of this year's Nobel Prize in physics. Three astrophysicists shared the prize: Roger Penrose received half of the distinction for his "discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the General Theory of Relativity," and Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez shared the other half for their "discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy."
Genzel and Ghez worked in two separate teams on two continents to probe the center of the Milky Way. Those who have attended the popular "Black Holes: The Other Side of Infinity" show, which plays frequently at the William M. Thomas Planetarium at Bakersfield College, will be more familiar with Ghez since her work is a centerpiece of the program.
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