The big picture: Tidal disruption events are some of the most powerful phenomena ever discovered in the observable universe. When a star wanders too close to a supermassive black hole, the singularity's gravitational pull and tidal forces shred it to pieces through spaghettification. It sounds funny enough but it is one of the worst ways to go, even for a lone star.
A team of researchers recently reported the discovery of AT2024wpp, an extremely energetic event involving a black hole and a massive star locked in a deadly cosmic dance. The stellar object was "spaghettified" by the black hole, a tidal disruption event that released an amount of energy equivalent to 400 billion times the energy of the Sun.
Daniel Perley, associate professor of astrophysics at Liverpool John Moores University, described the phenomenon as rare and awe-inspiring, surpassing even the most powerful supernovae known to date. While other TDEs have been observed previously, AT2024wpp appears to exist on a scale all its own.
Nicknamed the "Whippet," this TDE was first detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory in California. Follow-up observations were conducted with the Liverpool Telescope in the Canary Islands and NASA's Swift space observatory. These additional studies confirmed that AT2024wpp belongs to a specific subclass of TDEs known as Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transients.
LFBOTs are transient events similar to supernovae and gamma-ray bursts, distinguished by their extremely blue radiation and strong X-ray emissions. According to Perley, AT2024wpp was many times more energetic than comparable star-collapsing events. Only a handful of LFBOTs have been observed so far, and researchers note significant variations in their properties over time.
"Not only do these events help us identify black holes, they provide a new way to identify where black holes occur and how they form and grow, and the physics of how this happens," Perley said.
A unique feature of AT2024wpp is a massive shock wave produced as the star was shredded to atomic pieces. The wave propagated outward at one-fifth the speed of light, reverberating through the black hole's accretion disk before abruptly halting about six months later.
Researchers are now investigating one final mystery surrounding the event. Initially, AT2024wpp emitted no recognizable chemical signatures, but a few months after the explosion, weak traces of hydrogen and helium were detected. These gases may have originated from material stripped from the star's core during its destruction or could even hint at a third, as-yet-undiscovered object within the star – black hole system, the team speculates.