When a star comes too close to a black hole, the intense gravity of the black hole results in tidal forces that can rip the star apart. In these events, called tidal disruptions, some of the stellar debris is flung outward at high speeds, while the rest falls toward the black hole. This causes a distinct X-ray flare that can last for years. A team of astronomers, including several from the University of Maryland, has observed a tidal disruption event in a galaxy that lies about 290 million light years from Earth. The event is the closest tidal disruption discovered in about a decade, and is described in a paper published in the October 22, 2015 issue of the journal Nature.

"These results support some of our newest ideas for the structure and evolution of tidal disruption events," said study co-author Coleman Miller, professor of astronomy at UMD and director of the Joint Space-Science Institute. "In the future, tidal disruptions can provide us with laboratories to study the effects of extreme gravity." 

The optical light All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) originally discovered the tidal disruption, known as ASASSN-14li, in November 2014. The event occurred near a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy PGC 043234. Further study using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, NASA's Swift Gamma-ray Burst Explorer and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite provided a clearer picture by analyzing the tidal disruption's X-ray emissions.

"We have seen evidence for a handful of tidal disruptions over the years and have developed a lot of ideas of what goes on," said lead author Jon Miller, a professor of astronomy at the University of Michigan. "This one is the best chance we have had so far to really understand what happens when a black hole shreds a star."

After a star is destroyed by a tidal disruption, the black hole's strong gravitational forces draw in most of the star's remains. Friction heats this infalling debris, generating huge amounts of X-ray radiation. Following this surge of X-rays, the amount of light decreases as the stellar material falls beyond the black hole's event horizon--the point beyond which no light or other information can escape.

Gas often falls toward a black hole by spiraling inward and forming a disk. But the process that creates these disk structures, known as accretion disks, has remained a mystery. By observing ASASSN-14li, the team of astronomers was able to witness the formation of an accretion disk as it happened, by looking at the X-ray light at different wavelengths and tracking how those emissions changed over time.