Chandra Release - February 18, 2004

Visual Description: RX J1242-11

This 3-panel image is of RX J1242-11, where a giant black hole is ripping a star apart.  The top panel is an illustration.  It depicts how such an event may have occurred. A close encounter with another star put the doomed star (a small orange circle top left) on a path that took it near a supermassive black hole. The enormous gravity of the giant black hole stretched the star until it was torn apart. Because of the momentum and energy of the accretion process, only a few percent of the disrupted star's mass (indicated by a white stream) was swallowed by the black hole, while the rest was flung away into the surrounding galaxy. The star and black hole float in a sea of subtle brown, green and purple, with some pink hues. The black hole  is visible in the center of the illustration. Surrounding the black hole, there is a partial stream of pinkish-red gas and material that is starting to rotate around it. Observations with Chandra (lower left image, a bright blue-white dot) and XMM-Newton, combined with earlier images from ROSAT (not shown), confirmed that a powerful X-ray outburst had occurred in the center of the galaxy RX J1242-11. This appears normal in a ground-based optical image (lower right, bright red-orange blobs with a white circle in the center defining the location of the Chandra image). This X-ray outburst, one of the most powerful ever detected in a galaxy, was caused when gas from the disrupted star was heated to multimillion degree temperatures as it fell toward the black hole.