Caption

This visualization shows the average number of tidal disruption events (TDEs) NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is predicted to detect in a year, based on simulations. A TDE occurs when the gravitational forces of a supermassive black hole shred a star that wanders too close. Roman is expected to observe these events across cosmic time, reaching farther back than previous surveys—up to about 11 billion years ago.

In the video, each TDE is represented by a yellow flash inside a “sea” of white galaxies, and assigned a banjo tone whose pitch and duration encode when it occurred in cosmic history. TDEs that occur farther back in time are assigned lower-pitched tones to reflect the stretching of light to longer wavelengths—known as redshift—as it travels across our expanding universe. Events from earlier cosmic times are also represented with longer-lasting sounds to illustrate the effect of time dilation, where processes in distant galaxies appear stretched out in time from our point of view. Roman is predicted to detect about 100 of these events in a year.