An Enigmatic Cosmic Crime Scene | NOIRLab

An Enigmatic Cosmic Crime Scene | NOIRLab

Buried within NOIRLab’s unWISE archive lies a remarkable tidal disruption event, overlooked for many years because of its unusual location and characteristics. In galaxy NGC 7392 located just 137 million light-years away, astronomers witnessed a burst of electromagnetic radiation as a supermassive black hole pulled apart and devoured a star. The event, named WTP14adbjsh, was seen as a bright infrared flare.

This discovery suggests that we may be missing other tidal disruption events (TDEs), because we are not looking in the right part of the electromagnetic spectrum. This could help explain the TDEs we have detected to date.

Video Credits:

Images and Videos: ESO/M. Kornmesser, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (USRA/GESTAR), Th. Matsopoulos/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab

Duration: 1 minute

Release Date: Aug. 9, 2023

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