Indian telescope GROWTH looks into deep space to understand what happens when a dying star encounters a black hole

The Indian Institute of Astrophysics and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay together created the first fully robotic optical research telescope in India, known as Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen (GROWTH). This telescope’s main area of study is time-domain astronomy, which examines the universe’s exploding transients and fluctuating sources.

The uncommon optical flare produced by the collision of a dying star with a supermassive black hole was investigated by an international team of scientists. A portion of the star material was captured by the black hole, which then released it as ‘relativistic jets,’ beams of matter moving nearly as fast as light.

‘It doesn’t end well for the star. The star gets violently pulled apart by the black hole’s gravitational tidal forces. The shreds of the star form a spinning disc around the black hole and are eventually consumed by it. Such events are called Tidal Disruption Events, or TDEs,’ Varun Bhalerao, an astrophysicist at IIT Bombay, said in a statement .

The magazine Nature has published the study’s findings.

The research was based on photos taken on February 11, 2022, by the Zwicky Transient Facility project in California. These revealed the existence of a brand-new source in the sky called AT2022cmc, which appeared to have brightened quickly and was swiftly declining.