Chandra Release - January 9, 2019

Visual Description: ASASSN-14li

This is an artist's illustration of a so-called tidal disruption event (TDE), featuring a celestial object known as ASASSN-14li. A TDE occurs when a star passes too close to a supermassive black hole, causing its gravitational pull to disrupt the star's structure and eject some of its material into space. The artist's illustration shows the black hole at left. Close up to the viewer is the bright region, colored in yellow-orange, around the supermassive black hole after a star wandered too close and was ripped apart by extreme gravitational forces. Some of the remains of the star are pulled into an X-ray-bright disk where they circle the black hole before passing over the "event horizon," the boundary beyond which nothing, including light, can escape. An elongated white spot depicts a bright region in the disk, which causes a regular variation in the X-ray brightness of the source, allowing the spin rate of the black hole to be estimated. A curved region in the upper left shows where light from the other side of the disk has been curved over the top of the black hole.