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CTOnews.com, May 8 (Xinhua)-- astronomers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered a star torn apart by a supermassive black hole, the closest "tidal collapse" to Earth. The event was discovered for the first time in the infrared band, revealing the existence of tidal disintegration events previously hidden in dust.

According to CTOnews.com, a tidal collapse event (TDE,tidal disruption event) means that every 10, 000 years or so, the center of a galaxy lights up as its supermassive black hole engulfs a star. This process produces huge amounts of radiation, and astronomers can detect these events based on the light that reaches Earth and space telescopes, most of which come from X-rays and visible light.

Astronomers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovered the new tidal collapse in the infrared band, the first time scientists have identified TDE directly in the infrared band. More importantly, the newly discovered burst is the latest TDE ever observed: it occurred 137 million light-years away in the galaxy NGC 7392, which is 1/4 the distance of the next nearest TDE event.

The newly discovered burst, named WTP14adbjsh, is not prominent in traditional X-ray and visible light data. Scientists speculate that this is not because it does not emit X-rays and ultraviolet light, but because it is obscured by large amounts of dust, which absorbs radiation and emits heat in the form of infrared energy.

The researchers also found that WTP14adbjsh's galaxy is a young, active star-producing galaxy (star-forming galaxy), in contrast to most quiet galaxies where TDE occurs. Scientists expect TDE in star-producing galaxies because they produce more stars that can be swallowed by black holes. But star-producing galaxies also produce large amounts of dust from interactions between stars near the galactic core and the stars themselves. The dust can be detected in the infrared band, but it can also block any light from the core. This may explain why astronomers did not detect TDE in star-producing galaxies using traditional visible light methods.

"finding such a close-up TDE in our own backyard means that, statistically, there must be a population of TDE that has been ignored because it cannot be observed by traditional methods." Christos Panagiotou, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said, "these TDE may be a new type, and they have different physical properties from the TDE we have observed before. We need more observations to verify this."

Christos Panagiotou and his team used NASA's Weiss Space Telescope (WISE) and Spitzer Space Telescope (Spitzer) to detect WTP14adbjsh. They also used ESA's XMM- Newton Satellite (XMM-Newton) and NASA's Chernofsky Telescope (Chandra) to analyze X-ray data. They found that the time-dependent pattern of the brightness of WTP14adbjsh in the infrared band was similar to that of other TDE, but very weak in the X-ray band.

"this is a very interesting finding that shows that we need to find TDE in different ways." "if we only focus on X-rays or visible light, we will miss some TDE hidden in the dust," said Eric Bell, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "the infrared band can help us unveil these mysteries."

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