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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In January, scientists said they discovered an exploding star ending in a super-luminous supernova that was almost inconceivably bright -- more so than the output of the entire Milky Way. Now, new research shows the distant flare may have actually been the result of a rare cosmic collision.

Even when news about the exploding star was announced, it didn't quite seem like your run-of-the-mill supernova explosion of a star at the end of its life.

"The explosion's mechanism and power source remain shrouded in mystery because all known theories meet serious challenges in explaining the immense amount of energy ASASSN-15lh has radiated," astronomer Subo Dong said in a statement at the time.

A study based on new data and observations of ASASSN-15lh attempts to solve the mystery by re-classifying it as what's called a Tidal Disruption Event (TDE). That's the scientific way of saying that the powerful gravitational forces of a rotating black hole jarred and pulled at a star that passed too close, stretching it like spaghetti until it was ripped to pieces in a series of fantastic explosions.

At first, astronomers thought it was a super-supernova. Now they think the blast was caused by a crazy cosmic collision.
[...]
"We observed the source for 10 months following the event and have concluded that the explanation is unlikely to lie with an extraordinarily bright supernova," Giorgos Leloudas, of the Weizmann Institute of Science, said in a news release Monday. "Our results indicate that the event was probably caused by a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole as it destroyed a low-mass star."

The research will be published in a paper (PDF) in the debut issue of Nature Astronomy in January.

-- submitted from IRC

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