Scientists Fling Model Stars at a Virtual Black Hole to See Who Survives

This animation depicts a star experiencing spaghettification as it’s sucked in by a supermassive black hole during a ‘tidal disruption event’. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

Watch as eight stars skirt a

Watch eight model stars stretch and deform as they approach a virtual black hole 1 million times the mass of the Sun. The black hole rips some stars apart into a stream of gas, a phenomenon called a tidal disruption event. Others manage to withstand their close encounters. These simulations show that destruction and survival depend on the stars’ initial densities. Yellow represents the greatest densities, blue the least dense. Credit:

From left to right, this illustration shows four snapshots of a virtual Sun-like star as it approaches a black hole with 1 million times the Sun’s mass. The star stretches, looses some mass, and then begins to regain its shape as it moves away from the black hole. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Taeho Ryu (MPA)

Ryu and his team also investigated how other characteristics, such as different black hole masses and stellar close approaches, affect tidal disruption events. The results will help astronomers estimate how often full tidal disruptions occur in the universe and will aid them in building more accurate pictures of these calamitous cosmic occurrences.

Reference: “Tidal Disruptions of Main-sequence Stars. I. Observable Quantities and Their Dependence on Stellar and Black Hole Mass” by Taeho Ryu, Julian Krolik, Tsvi Piran and Scott C. Noble, 25 November 2021, The Astrophysical Journal.
DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/abb3cf