PBS Space Time

PBS Space Time - Season 2024 Episode 24 The NEW PHYSICS of Black Hole Star Capture | Extreme Tidal Disruption Events

2025-09-04 48 minutes.
10.00 1 votes

Season - Episode

2024 Season 2024 Jan 10, 2024
2023 Season 2023 Jan 11, 2023
2022 Season 2022 Jan 12, 2022
2021 Season 2021 Jan 12, 2021
2020 Season 2020 Jan 06, 2020
2019 Season 2019 Jan 09, 2019
2018 Season 2018 Jan 10, 2018
2017 Season 2017 Jan 04, 2017
2016 Season 2016 Jan 06, 2016
2015 Season 2015 Feb 11, 2015
1 Season 1 Feb 11, 2015
0 Season 0 Apr 10, 2017

Overview

If you track the motion of individual stars in the ultra-dense star cluster at the very center of the Milky Way you’ll see that they swing in sharp orbits around some vast but invisible mass—that’s the Sagittarius A* supermassive black hole. These are perilous orbits, and sometimes a star wanders just a little too close to that lurking monster, leading to its utter destruction in the spectacular phenomenon known as a tidal disruption event. We’ve never seen a TDE in the Milky Way, but we’ve seen them in distant galaxies—and we now know how to spot stellar destructions so extreme that they reveal properties of the black hole itself.

Year
Studio
Director
Crew
Popularity 1.2198
Language English