Astronomers have exposed the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to its first glimpses of the universe's most violent and gory events: stars being ripped apart and devoured by black holes. The powerful space telescope discovered the black holes involved in these stellar murders lay in wait, slumbering in dusty galaxies, until their victims approach.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the team focused on several of these so-called tidal disruption events (TDEs) in dusty, shrouded galaxies. TDEs occur when a supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy latches on to a passing star and shreds it, releasing a tremendous blast of energy. Since the observation of the first TDE in the 1990s by the X-ray ROSAT All-Sky Survey, astronomers have discovered around 100 such star-destroying events.
