First glimpse of black hole swallowing star, ejecting flare of matter

For the first time, astronomers have witnessed a star the size of our Sun being completely ripped apart and destroyed by a supermassive black hole.

“These events are extremely rare”, said lead researcher Sjoert van Velzen from Johns Hopkins University.

“But this is the first time we first get a clear view of the stellar destruction, followed by the jet”, van Velzen said in an email to Xinhua. Black holes are areas of space so dense that irresistible gravitational force stops the escape of matter, gas and even light, rendering them invisible and creating the effect of a void in the fabric of space.

Scientists likened the process in which black holes swallow matter with the way the moon’s tidal forces tend to pull Earth’s oceans toward it. The exact mechanism caused the star to be swallowed by the black hole but on a much, much larger scale, study authors explained. The study has been published in Science Journal on November 26. This galaxy is about 300 million light years away, while the others were at least three times farther away.

Once the star was disintegrated, it began ejecting matter that formed a disk of debris around the black hole, eventually being discharged into the horizon at the speed of light.

“The event was first picked up by the All-sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN), and followed up with the Arcminute Microkelvin Imager Large Array, located in Cambridge”, said team member Dr Gemma Anderson, of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research.

An worldwide team of astronomers has witnessed a massive black hole swallowing a whole star for the first time. These jets produce an energy that equals our Sun energy output over 10 million years. “From our observations, we learn the streams of stellar debris can organise and make a jet rather quickly, which is valuable input for constructing a complete theory of these events”, van Velzen said.

“Everything we know about black holes suggests we should see a jet when this happens but until now they’ve only been detected in a few of the most powerful systems”. Scientists managed to see it using both optical as well as radio telescopes.

‘The destruction of a star by a black hole is beautifully complicated, and far from understood, ‘ van Velzen said.

Although one current theory hinges on the belief that the release of any form of light from a black hole proves that our traditional conception of them is incorrect, the current team of researchers see things differently.