When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.An illustration of a tidal disruption event in which a star is devoured by a black hole. | Credit: ESA/C. CarreauAstronomers have discovered that an unusual optical flare is the result of a star being ripped apart and devoured by a black hole — and what really sets this so-called Tidal Disruption Event (TDE) apart is the fact that the black hole involved seems to be an example of an elusive “intermediate mass black hole,” a class of this object that has challenged astronomers for decades.TDEs generally occur when stars venture too close to the supermassive black holes that sit at the heart of large galaxies, resulting in the immense gravity of these cosmic titans simultaneously squashing the stellar body horizontally while stretching it vertically. This “spaghettification” creates a stellar noodle wrapping around the black hole. Some of the remains are fed to the central black hole, while much of it is blasted away at near-light speeds as high-energy jets. These events can take hundreds of days or even years to fade.AdvertisementAdvertisementThis optical flare, designated AT2022zod, was spotted in October 2022 and lasted just over a month. It was traced to the galaxy SDSS J105602.80+561214.7, located around 1.5 billion light-years away from Earth. What was intriguing about this was the fact that the TDE occurred around 10,000 light-years away from the center of this galaxy, where its supermassive black hole dwells. That was the first hint this was the work not of a central supermassive black hole, but of a non-central intermediate mass black hole.”AT2022zod has the characteristics of a TDE, a flare we observe when a star is ripped apart by interacting with a black hole. These events are, in general, not common, but since we expect a supermassive black hole in the center of almost every galaxy, TDEs are expected to be observed in the center of their host galaxy,” team leader Kristen Dage of Curtin University, Australia, told Space.com. “However, AT2022zod is slightly off-nuclear, and very short in comparison with previously observed TDEs, while still highly energetic.”When observed at distances as great as this, TDEs generally last for hundreds of days, making AT2022zod’s month-long duration from Oct. 13 to Nov. 18 highly unusual. “The combination of being hosted by an elliptical galaxy, famously home to large populations of star clusters, while being off-nuclear and of short duration, made us intrigued that this may be one of the elusive intermediate mass black holes that might exist outside the center of the galaxy, and more importantly, open a new avenue to search for and study them,” Dage continued.Intermediate black holes as cosmic midd …
