00:04250 million light years away, a black hole recently had a feast of stellar proportions.
00:09The event happened in March last year, but astronomers caught the event on several telescopes,
00:14capturing the moment the star was caught in the black hole's gravity well,
00:17before being sucked in and ripped apart by it, causing what experts call a tidal disruption event,
00:22or when the cataclysmic destruction of a star by a black hole sends a flare of electromagnetic radiation whirling around
00:28its accretion disk.
00:29While 250 million light years away might seem like a vast distance,
00:33this is actually the fifth closest tidal disruption event experts have ever witnessed.
00:37The whole thing lasted 430 days, all occurring in a black hole that weighs in at 10 million times the
00:43mass of our sun.
00:44The strange thing, however, is that after a star is torn asunder by a black hole,
00:48the star's material usually forms what's called a corona, a ring of extremely hot electrons.
00:53Powerful jets of plasma then fire off in opposite directions from the black hole,
00:56jettisoning the material caught in the black hole's magnetic field lines.
01:00But even after all of this time, none of the observatories monitoring the event have seen any of the expected
01:05jets,
01:06despite a corona having developed.
01:07With the study's lead author, Yuhan Yao, explaining,
01:10we've never seen a tidal disruption event with X-ray emissions like this without a jet present.
01:14And that's really spectacular because it means we can potentially disentangle what causes jets and what causes corona.
01:22We'll see you next time.
01:23Bye.
01:24Bye.
01:24Bye.
01:25Bye.
01:26Bye.
