Tidal Disruption Events

You might think of black holes as neat, bottomless pits that suck everything in around them. But in reality, they’re extremely messy eaters — more like a baby flinging spaghetti than a vacuum cleaner.

As a star orbits a black hole, gravity begins to stretch it, much like how the Moon raises tides on Earth. But when the star gets a little too close, the difference in gravitational pull across the star becomes so strong that it overwhelms the star’s own gravity. As a result, the star gets stretched, shredded, and “spaghettified” in a tidal disruption event (TDE).

Like spaghetti launched from a high chair, stellar debris is flung outward into long, glowing streams of hot gas. Some of it spirals toward the black hole, heating up and blazing so brightly that it can briefly outshine its entire host galaxy — effectively shining a beacon on an otherwise hidden black hole.

TDEs are extremely rare and unpredictable, and scientists have discovered only a few hundred TDEs so far. But even rare events can be caught by watching enough of the sky, and watching it often.

That’s where NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory comes in. With its wide view and repeated scans of the entire visible sky, Rubin is expected to reveal thousands of TDEs over the next decade. By catching black holes mid-meal — and often early on — scientists can trigger follow-up observations, uncover hidden black holes, and study how the smaller supermassive black holes that produce TDEs grow and evolve.

Further exploration:

• Learn how Rubin detects changes in the sky in this video
• Learn how Rubin will alert the world to those changes, including TDEs
• Explore a different sort of hungry black hole, called an active galactic nucleus