NASA's TESS satellite stumbled upon a star being shredded by a supermassive black hole. The black hole responsible for the event likely weighs about six million times the mass of our sun.
TESS is surveying an area in the sky that is 400 times larger than what Kepler observed, including 200,000 of the brightest nearby stars. Over the course of two years, the four wide-field cameras on board will stare at different sectors of the sky for days at a time. As part of that mission, and for the first time, TESS stumbled upon a star being shredded by a supermassive black hole.
"Only a handful of TDEs have been discovered before they reached peak brightness and this one was found just a few days after it started to brighten; plus, thanks to it being in what's called TESS' 'continuous viewing zone,' we have observations of it every 30 minutes going back months -- more than ever before possible for one of these events," said Thomas Holoien, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institute for Science.
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