The NEW PHYSICS of Black Hole Star Capture | Extreme Tidal Disruption Events

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:to.pbs.org/Dona...
Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord!
/ pbsspacetime
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.
Check out the Space Time Merch Store
www.pbsspaceti...
Sign up for the mailing list to get episode notifications and hear special announcements!
mailchi.mp/1a6...
Search the Entire Space Time Library Here: search.pbsspac...
Hosted by Matt O'Dowd
Written by Matt Caplan & Matt O'Dowd
Post Production by Leonardo Scholzer, Yago Ballarini & Stephanie Faria
Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
Associate Producer: Bahar Gholipour
Executive Producers: Eric Brown & Andrew Kornhaber
Executive in Charge for PBS: Maribel Lopez
Director of Programming for PBS: Gabrielle Ewing
Assistant Director of Programming for PBS: John Campbell
Spacetime is a production of Kornhaber Brown for PBS Digital Studios.
This program is produced by Kornhaber Brown, which is solely responsible for its content.
© 2024 PBS. All rights reserved.
End Credits Music by J.R.S. Schattenberg: / multidroideka
Space Time Was Made Possible In Part By:
Big Bang
Wojciech Szymski
Bryce Fort
Peter Barrett
David Paryente
Alexander Tamas
Morgan Hough
Juan Benet
Vinnie Falco
Mark Rosenthal
Supernova
Grace Biaelcki
Glenn Sugden
Ethan Cohen
Stephen Wilcox
The Tyacke boys
Mark Heising
Hypernova
Richard Pavlicek
Dean Galvin
Michael Tidwell
Robert DeChellis
Stephen Spidle
Chris Webb
Justin Lloyd
David Giltinan
Kenneth See
Gregory Forfa
Alex Kern
Scott Gorlick
Paul Stehr-Green
Ben Delo
Scott Gray
Антон Кочков
Robert Ilardi
John R. Slavik
Donal Botkin
Edmund Fokschaner
chuck zegar
Daniel Muzquiz
Gamma Ray Burst
Param Saxena
John De Witt
Kevin Vallejo
Nathaniel Bennett
Sandhya Devi
Michael Oulvey
Arko Provo Mukherjee
Mike Purvis
Christopher Wade
Anthony Crossland
treborg777
Grace Seraph
Stephen Saslow
Tomaz Lovsin
Anthony Leon
Lori Ferris
Koen Wilde
Nicolas Katsantonis
Richard Steenbergen
gmmiddleton
Joe Pavlovic
Chuck Lukaszewski
Cole B Combs
Andrea Galvagni
Jerry Thomas
Nikhil Sharma
John Anderson
Bradley Ulis
Craig Falls
Kane Holbrook
Ross Story
Harsh Khandhadia
Jammer
Matt Q
Michael Lev
Rad Antonov
Terje Vold
James Trimmier
comboy
Jeremy Soller
Paul Wood
Kent Durham
jim bartosh
qntum
John H. Austin, Jr.
Diana S
Faraz Khan
Almog Cohen
Daniel Jennings
Jeremy Reed
David Johnston
Michael Barton
Isaac Suttell
Bleys Goodson
Mark Delagasse
Mark Daniel Cohen
Shane Calimlim
Tybie Fitzhugh
Eric Kiebler
Craig Stonaha
Frederic Simon
Tonyface
Jim Hudson
Alex Gan
John Funai
Adrien Molyneux
Bradley Jenkins
Vlad Shipulin
Justin Waters
Thomas Dougherty
Dan Warren
Joseph Salomone
Julien Dubois

[@jdrobertson42]

I love that we need an “extreme” category to distinguish from boring, everyday events where a star is pulled apart.

[@douglaswilkinson5700]

The International Astronomical Union in Paris has the authority to name celestial objects and events. However, when astrophysicists spot something new and give it a name they usually approve it.

[@anaryl]

Perfect episode to watch whilst eating swirly ice cream.

[@yz250ftony]

I have a chocolate milkshake

[@memyself3510]

Disappointed Matt isn’t wearing that super drip jacket in the video. Look at our dude looking all badass

[@bahayesilyurt9433]

agreed. should have sported shades as well

[@luudest]

He jacked is so black you don‘t see it.

[@Datamining101]

He had a very Farscape look going there.

[@sogerc1]

IDK why, but I find the normal TDE so beautiful.

[@Nova_Afterglow]

supermodel thumbnail pics now? okay space time turning the sexy up

[@Kelticfury]

So massive it reveals data about the black hole. Awesome.

[@mrwinemaker]

Matt is absolutely mogging in the thumbnail

[@holographic_red]

I was JUST thinking, hmm, when did spacetime drop a video last?..

[@Titanic-wo6bq]

that time sure knows how to space itself considering it makes up everything

[@TadashiAbashi]

Last time I was this fast, the first black holes were still forming!

[@luudest]

What happens to the star’s core when the spaghettification starts? Does the fusion end? What happens to the temperature of the star‘s gas?

[@eljuano28]

What friggin' Rockstar named it Spaghettification???

[@Hecatom]

For a moment I thought this was a video about Quasi Stars

[@Catdad76801]

Nearly ten minutes before 'acretion disk' even gets mentioned, it's what I had been thinking, a one-star quasar, once known in antiquity as an 'active galaxy.'

[@WestOfEarth]

You describe these models as using non-rotating BHs. So how do the models change, and our observed effects change, when BH is rotating? Which I understand is 99% of BHs out there.

[@mrJety89]

Relativistic Magneto-Hydrodynamics Relativistic Quantum-Magneto-Hydrodynamics Relativistic Gravito-Quanto-Magneto-Hydrodynamics

[@helicalactual]

Beyond amazing

[@MichaelSkinner-e9j]

What do you think of the idea of creating a tiny black hole and just orbiting it as an interstellar engine and “shield?” Any fast moving objects would get caught up in its orbit and you just park it in orbit and drop it where you need to put it to essentially drive it at the leading edge/elliptical orbit

[@MCsCreations]

Fascinating!

[@Phlosioneer]

I really miss the Q&A after episodes. So many good details, so many good jokes.

[@CarletonTorpin]

I love it when a PBS Space Time episode is sponsored by only the actual patrons.

[@hoboswaggins7771]

Thanks!!

[@joz6683]

Fantastic timing in bed ill, with COVID😷, four years after everyone else😂so this video is making me feel better 👍

[@oldboy8150]

get better soon!

[@nishgriff1]

Man I'm so happy we get to watch these. Amazing content.

[@AiHubNow]

We would love a video on the relationship between the definitions of entropy in thermodynamics as apposed to how entropy is defined in quantum mechanics and how each definition relates to the event horizon of a black hole.

[@markovcd]

I LIKE PIE

[@k0lpA]

Extreme Tidal Disruption sounds like a technical death metal song

[@frostyusername5011]

Not death metal, but more death core

[@GraemeWight-wx3xz]

Weird, i cant stop think about pufferfish carrot.

[@MrTryAnotherOne]

So, essentially the blackhole forms a miniature galaxy?

[@tomaburque]

Hey folks, there's a comet coming next month! Don't be alarmed but spectrographic analysis shows it's emitting cyanide.

[@tiagotiagot]

Is it the Mandela effect, or "spaghetification" used to mean something other than just plain tidal disruption? I could swear the definition I grew up with, was that things would get extruded thru spacetime because the geodesics converged so strongly that the falling trajectory converged faster than repulsive inter-particle forces could hold things in shape, essentially inducing an inward-pressure in the plane orthogonal to the falling direction, like the topology of spacetime behaved sorta like a hyper-funnel; with the neck of the funnel approaching (maybe even reaching) zero thickness, so even things that somehow first survived the squeeze would end up reaching the point where the shell of a given altitude has less surface area than the thing's cross-section causing them to squeeze themselves due to the wrap-around nature of spacetime near the singularity....

[@jeremyholbrook2094]

Such a powerful build-up for maybe later 😢 I could never be in charge of spending we'd go broke 😂

[@BeulahSon]

I imagine, using a black hole that is actually physically possible would cause the simulation to past like a thousand years. But otherwise, I guess this can still give you some good things to chase to add to the understanding.

[@seijirou302]

Aren't there far more galaxies where the etde x-ray light would be red-shifted down to visible, than galaxies close enough where it's still x-rays when reaching us?

[@perrygershin3946]

I really enjoy videos like this, thank you!

[@Twade0593]

Nice got it at 47 seconds after posting lol

[@Akira-jd2zr]

that scientist's name is Dr. Dragon

[@mikeblake9761]

Matt I've been watching PBS in reverse whilst waiting for new episodes and I can confirm that you're entirely time symmetric. You're also way better than the first host who spoke like he was running out of air.

[@xaavik75]

I have two questions. One, you didn't discuss time dilation around the supermassive blackholes. I saw time 'passing' in the simulation but I'm curious if that was time measured in the reference frame of the TDE or time as measured in our own reference frame. That would then lead to another question about the 'ramp up' and 'fading' times you mentioned. Are the TDEs actually happening much much much more rapidly than a month/year in their own reference frame so that for us, it would be months-years, or were those month/year numbers already referring to the TDE reference frame? Two, you also didn't talk about redshift. You said that the eTDEs are emitting mostly in x-rays but, again, is that x-ray generation by the TDE, or is that x-rays as we would detect here on earth (implying high energy gamma ray emission, redshifted down to x-rays for us)? I would think that for galaxies that are quite far away, the redshift would move those x-rays down into UV or even visible light, in which case I wonder why we wouldn't have already seen/measured them?

[@wraith1771]

Could TDEs allude to an earlier appearance of larger amounts of heavier elements?

[@DJNiems]

Is this what creates a quasar?

[@michaelpipkin9942]

Yo, this one was good. Took my brain another step up....haha

[@BaldmanB]

Last

[@doodoo2065]

Last+1

[@prashank]

Of

[@ObjectsInMotion]

@@doodoo2065nice thoodie pfp

[@freshtoast3879]

​@@prashank The

[@noahwilliams8996]

What would it look like to see one of these in our own galaxy?

[@jonatanromanowski9519]

Mooooooooar

[@martinphipps2]

If Ryu is a Chinese family name then it is a single syllable. His name is probably Rui 芮 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rui_(surname)

[@Mernom]

Is the TDE simulation footage avaivable anywhere easily accesible?

[@1.4142]

another reason to save chandra

[@alzeebum]

Yeah I think there was a script error in this one, the spaghettification and that is a different thing. This just sounds like the star getting inside the Roche Limit.

[@FirstLast-ll8zq]

The two are essentially the same, but have to due with different astronomical objects. Tidal Disruption Events, or TDE’s, have to do with supermassive black holes. specifically, the term “spaghettification” is used because the star is stretched into a stream of particles as it starts to get close, before accelerating to relativistic/near-relativistic speeds.

[@lawrencekelly951]

If gravity is a function of mass not quantum, and black holes have no mass because every thing that falls in goes to the singularly which gets compressed to infinite density, what exactly is warping space time to create the massive gravity?

[@DaiBaNANA]

Woa

[@Khannea]

THE NAME FOR THAT IS AZATHOTH, MATTHEW

[@Datamining101]

I don’t really understand. Isn’t EM super important here since we care about the radiation we’ll see? Don’t you want RMHD, not just RHD?

[@wizardpajamas6405]

Are those black hole gaming mats gone already? I was on vacation and just now catching up on videos so I hope I'm just not seeing the mats in the merch store :(

[@jorisvergeerTBA]

Congrats on the π-million subscribers

[@Tigerbiten]

Isn't the Tidal Radius just the Roche Limit.

[@larrydavis9851]

"There's no such thing as gravity"- Bryce Mitchell

[@mrJety89]

How is this different from any regular quasar

[@PendragonDaGreat]

Would the Tidal Radius and the Roche Limit be the same thing? I've never heard the term "Tidal Radius" before now in this context.

[@tixch2000]

I cannot imagine how complex is a simulation of hydrodynamic GR models... Amazing video.

[@Torskel]

I’m confused on the rotating and none rotating, they’re all rotating since the space around it is also getting rotated

[@Mahros1]

So is the interior of a black hole warm? That is, above absolute zero as there is heat going into the black hole but nothing can leave one? Or are they already hot due to their density and eating a sun barely makes a difference?

[@fightocondria]

congrats on a megapi of subscribers.

[@denishenea2996]

What if the variation in the ellipsis of an object orbiting a certain black hole is due to the other side of the BH in question, ie. leading to an earlier stage in time of the universe, which may vary periodically; depending on the stage of the other side, earlier or further down in the universe’s age, if this make sense? A bit like your car window being the constant opening, when going at different speeds, the pressure is so different from inside the cabin (our side of the visible universe) things can still be affected by the outside (other side of the BH) I’m no expert and may have not put this is the best words, just an interest idea.

[@l.i.a.m.b]

why aren’t the sources in the description?

[@RonnyAndersson-q9b]

Cool.

[@Sutairn]

So the idea I have from watching this is, shouldn't a galaxy with a duel core like andromeda cause stars orbiting them to decay faster due to the wobble each blackhole would cause on the other. Is maybe the milkyway not been a quasar for so long due to it not merging with a similar sized galaxy to cause this wobble. Milkyway has been found to have some 50 dwarf galaxy orbiting it, has it had time to merge with all those or are all their cores still orbiting outside the arms of the milkyway?

[@Sutairn]

okay lets talk spaghetti that can only happen around a blackhole, yes and thats when things get real fast cause your on a spiral toward the blackhole itself. But tidal forces can happen around something like even jupiter, watch comet shoe marker levi 9 get ripped apart by tidal forces from jupiter before it impacts. This has a similar effect from tidal forces but why this happens is completely different then why spaghettification happens.

[@BeulahSon]

15 seconds and I already liked it

[@PPP-on3vl]

WE ARE LIVING IN A BLACK HOLE

[@dustinswatsons9150]

I have commented that before

[@dustinswatsons9150]

Black wholes merging on that aspect 😮

[@Alex-js5lg]

I like to think the universe started from a white hole and that black holes have their own nested universes.

[@onedeadsaint]

when or how can i simulate these things on my pc? i'd love to watch a star get ripped apart!

[@TheGodParticle333]

I miss these videos. Haven’t watched them in a while. You’re very entertaining brother

[@AnomalyXero]

19 Seconds

[@kerycktotebag8164]

beat me

[@damanybrown5036]

Is it true that there is a stellar mass black hole circling Sagittarius A*?

[@Alex-js5lg]

I'm sure there are many black holes orbiting SA*, but I can't imagine how we'd detect a stellar mass black hole anywhere near it when SA* is over 4,000,000 solar masses.

[@slyy4096]

Years ago I thought the nose is red because of corona, but now I get it.

[@hermaeus_jackson]

Whys he posted up all cute like

[@thisisnotaboutelephants]

i saw at 10 sec

[@thisisnotaboutelephants]

HERE BEOFRE ONE MINUTE: \|/

[@Daniel-zh4ln]

First Comment! Never been this early

[@ObjectsInMotion]

You weren't first actually

[@ValidatingUsername]

Can gas clouds act as a plasma 🧐🤫😉🙃🤣

[@Jermo7899]

57 seconds

[@kricketflyd111]

I just watched 2 black hole programs new today, one apologizing for our lack of understanding and the other with the latest guess. I'm not buying it. 😂

[@kerycktotebag8164]

2 views in 40secs, yada yada

[@SterbiusMcGurbius]

Like when the fat kid jumps in the pool

[@anam.caballerowilson9421]

🥰

[@vinniepeterss]

❤❤

[@jasungraham8325]

God's Realm

[@teamruddy611]

Spegetification is not the stretching of stars into a band of matter. Spegetification is the stretching of objects very close to the black hole's event horizon, as the black hole consumes matter/objects/other stuff. This does not occur for single particles.

[@vrus91]

The star was overcome by the black holes gravity and pulled apart. That is spaghettification.

[@vrus91]

It does not matter that the star was moving.

[@juliavixen176]

It's all the same process for the same reasons. For small rigid objects, you don't see the effect until the gradient is of extreme magnitude... but for a much larger object like a star or planet, a less steep gradient will do the same thing.

[@DRSulik]

The map is not the territory.

[@asddsa9468]

i love this dude but his accent and stuffed nose... thank you for subtitles.

[@CleverNeologism]

Wait... spaghettification is applied to things outside a black hole too? I thought that only applied to super-extreme tidal effects near the singularity.

[@juliavixen176]

It's all the same process for the same reasons. For small rigid objects, you don't see the effect until the gradient is of extreme magnitude... but for a much larger object like a star or planet, a less steep gradient will do the same thing.

[@OOL-UV2]

That and the gaseous nature of a star’s layers must make it easier. Stars get siphoned by other stars.

[@theuniversewithin74]

🌒🌑🌘🌐🌑🌐🌑🌐🌒🌑🌘

[@ASAPBlanco]

Matt gotta start wearing the leather jacket in videos, thumbnail isn’t enough

[@memehi8081]

Super early

[@theuniversewithin74]

🌒🌑🌘🌑🌑🌐🌑🌑🌒🌑🌘

[@primeedits840]

First ever!

[@XKloosyvv]

Last time I came this early, my wife filed for divorce

[@larrysimpson7519]

Ahh when you click on a pbs vid at 9 secs

[@oleromer9525]

The so called music is very annoying. As always.

[@ocoro174]

you won't find much success with that thumbnail I'm afraid

[@jf9912]

Ya ever smoke a super massive crack bowl? Im sorry. Addiction is not a laughing matter, I just knew this one guy in my physics 2 class. He used to go to the bathroom alot. We studied together during finals. I realized my ADHD meds were half gone. He was a brilliant person. I hope he overcome his problem. Sometimes madness is the cost of genius.

[@jf9912]

Just realize addicts are people too. They may be disturbed, but they may also be brilliant.

[@douglaswilkinson5700]

The shortage of ADHD meds -- e.g. Adderall -- is in large part due to people who borrow/take/buy meds not prescribed to them (per my hospital pharmacist.)

[@jf9912]

@@douglaswilkinson5700 True. I switched to an antidepressant that works. It is just as effective, but no insomnia, or increased blood pressure. Plus it works for anxiety too. I think I might be 3 inches taller if I had never been on ritalin, provigil, dexedrine or adderall. All those stimulants stunt growth, and I can't help but think they contributed to my recent heart problems. I got covid back in 2020. Now I have 25% heart function. I am disabled now (and depressed that I can't even mow the lawn). The only pleasure left to me is learning. Although I was never able to chose one field of science, I am glad this show exists. It offers me comfort.