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Indian Institute of Astrophysics News

16 Sep 2020

Indian scientists find new model to probe how black holes rip apart stars

Scientists from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) have found a new way to probe into supermassive black holes – detecting their properties like mass and spin by observing how they rip apart stars. They have found a model which can infer black hole mass, its spin by observing how the stars are ripped apart on coming to the vicinity of these astronomical bodies with high gravitational force found at the centre of some massive galaxies. Most black holes lead to isolated lives and are impossible to study. Astronomers study them by watching for their effects on nearby stars and gas. Stars are disrupted when the black hole's tidal gravity exceeds the star's self-gravity, and this phenomenon is called tidal disruption events (TDE). This model, which can be applied after the star is observed to be tidally disrupted, and an accretion disk is formed, will help in expanding our understanding of the physics besides building valuable statistics of the black hole mass and stellar mass. Supermassive black holes govern the movement of stars orbiting within their gravitational potential, and their tidal forces can disrupt or rip apart the stars that come to their vicinity.

10 Feb 2016

Man in India not killed by meteorite, says NASA

The US daily also cited a scientist at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics which is analysing samples of the rock provided by the police as doubting if it was a meteorite.

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