Spinning Black Hole Swallowing Star Explains Superluminous Event
![An extraordinarily brilliant point of light seen in a distant galaxy, and dubbed ASASSN-15lh, was thought to be the brightest supernova ever seen. But new observations from several observatories, including ESO, have now cast doubt on this classification. Instead, a group of astronomers propose that the source was an even more extreme and very rare event — a rapidly spinning black hole ripping apart a passing star that came too close. Credit: ESO, ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser Spinning Black Hole Swallowing Star Explains Superluminous Event](https://alaska-native-news.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/black-hole-star.jpg)
In 2015, the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN) detected an event, named ASASSN-15lh, that was recorded as the brightest supernova ever — and categorised as a superluminous supernova, the explosion of an extremely massive star at the end of its life. It was twice as bright as the previous record holder, and at […]