A black hole tore a star apart and sent a ghost particle express
Cosmic neutrinos are ghost particles, passing freely through the Earth. The IceCube telescope in the ice of Antarctica once caught such a neutrino, and it matched an infrared flare. That flare turned out to be the moment a black hole tore a star apart in a distant galaxy. Astronomers call this process spaghettification: the star gets stretched into a thin thread by uneven gravity.
During the disruption, some of the material is ejected outward, slamming into clouds of cosmic dust and gas. These collisions spawn particles of monstrous energy, including neutrinos. Radio telescopes confirmed: at the site of the catastrophe, a shock wave several light-years across is still raging.
If such coincidences recur, we'll understand how black holes act as natural accelerators, boosting matter to unimaginable speeds.
Original abstract
as written by the authors arXiv:2601.05601v1
Despite the growing number of high-energy neutrinos (TeV-PeV) detected by IceCube, their astrophysical origins remain largely unidentified. Recent observations have linked a few tidal disruption events (TDEs) to the production of high-energy neutrino emission, all of which display dust-reprocessed infrared flares, indicating a dust- and gas-rich environment. By cross-matching the neutrino events and a sample of mid-infrared outbursts in nearby galaxies with transient radio flares, we uncover an optically obscured TDE candidate, SDSS J151345.75 $$+$$ 311125.2, which shows both spatial and temporal coincidence with the sub-PeV neutrino event IC170514B. Using a standard equipartition analysis of the synchrotron spectral evolution spanning 605 days post mid-infrared discovery, we find a little evolution in the radio-emitting region, with a kinetic energy up to $$10^{51}$$ erg, depending on the outflow geometry and shock acceleration efficiency assumed. High-resolution European VLBI Network imaging reveals a compact radio emission that is unresolved at a scale of $$<$$ 2.1 pc, with a brightness temperature of $$T_b>5\times10^6$$ K, suggesting that the observed late-time radio emission might originate from the interaction between a decelerating outflow and a dense circumnuclear medium. If the association is genuine, the neutrino production is possibly related to the acceleration of protons through pp collisions during the outflow expanding process, implying that the outflow-cloud interaction could provide a physical site with a high-density environment for producing the sub-PeV neutrinos. Such a scenario can be tested with future identifications of radio transients coincident with high-energy neutrinos.
The name "spaghettification" came about because the difference in gravitational pull near a black hole stretches any object into a long thread — just like a strand of spaghetti.