Chandra Release - August 14, 2024

Visual Description: AT2018fyk

In this digital illustration, a star sheds stellar debris as it orbits a supermassive black hole. This artist's impression represents the center of a galaxy about 860 million light-years from Earth.

The supermassive black hole sits at our upper left. It resembles an irregular, pitch-black sphere at the heart of an almond-shaped pocket of swirling sand and dirt. Though gritty in texture, the swirling brown and grey pocket is actually a disk of hot gas.

Near our lower right is the orbiting star. In this illustration, the star is relatively close to us, with the black hole far behind it. The star is a blue-white ball that, from this perspective, appears slightly larger than the distant black hole.

Two tapered streaks peel off of the glowing star like the pulled-back corners of a smile. These streaks represent tidal tails of stellar debris; material pulled from the surface of the star by the gravity of the black hole. This partial destruction of the star occurs every 3.5 years, when the star's orbit brings it closest to the supermassive black hole.

During the orbit, the stellar debris from the tidal tails is ingested by the black hole. A byproduct of this digestion is the X-ray gas which swirls in a disk around the black hole.