WWW.ASTRONOMY.COM 25
When a star disappears down
the throat of a black hole, the f lash
is just the start of the show.
BY YVETTE CENDES
A STAR
I
wake up to a chime
from my smartphone.
Bleary-eyed, I check it
— and jolt awake upon
seeing an automated
email from the
MeerKAT radio tele-
scope in South Africa.
The subject line reads:
“AT 2018xxx 2hr has been
completed.” The message
tells me that while I was
sleeping, MeerKAT
observed a target for two
hours and, after some ini-
tial image processing, the
observation is now ready
for me in the archives. All
that remains for me, half a
world away in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, to do is go
online and download it.
The lure of potential dis-
covery wakes me up more
than a pot of coffee ever
could. This could be it! A
modern radio astronomer
does not have to travel to
faraway lands to collect the
data herself — arguably less
romantic. But the thrill of
anticipation and discovery
stays the same, no matter
where on Earth you are.
I drum my fingers while
waiting for my laptop to
load the image, excitement
mounting as I wonder what
I’m about to see. There are
a lot of stars and galaxies
in this patch of sky, but
that’s just window dressing.
The real excitement would
be overlooked by the
untrained eye: a tiny collec-
tion of unobtrusive pixels
in the middle of the image.
It is light from a star’s final
gasp as a supermassive
black hole at the center of a
galaxy gets violent, pulling
the star apart and cannibal-
izing it. A tidal disruption
event (TDE), as these
occurrences are called, is
one of the most energetic