NASA has captured an image of a black hole tearing apart a large star as a result of a “tidal event,” as astronomers call it. This is a greatly enlarged version of the effect in which the moon’s gravity causes tides in the ocean on Earth, the Mirror reports.
The black hole was named ASASSN-14li. It is located about 290 million light years from Earth and was first detected in 2014.
To obtain a detailed image of ASASSN-14li, NASA used the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) XMM-Newton Space Telescope.
Dr. Brenna Mockler, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Observatory and the University of California, Los Angeles, compared X-ray telescopes to forensic tools that help solve crimes in outer space, and noted that they found large amounts of nitrogen in the star’s remnants, which could indicate that its weight could be three times the mass of the Sun.
This means that the star torn apart by the black hole was one of the most massive stars studied by astronomers.
