November 29, 2015

Artistic illustration of the event ASASSN-14li with the accretion disk around the black hole and part of the materials from the shredded star forming a tail (Image Spectrum: NASA/CXC/U.Michigan/J.Miller et al.; Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss)

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An article published in the journal “Science” describes the observations of a supermassive black hole with a mass a few millions times that of the Sun that destroyed a star with the consequent formation of a jet of matter moving at speeds close to that of light. This event, called ASASSN-14li, had already been described a few weeks ago in another study whose results were published in the journal “Nature”.