A gigantic black hole has been captured pulling in and ripping apart a star for the first time.
The star, which was about the same size as our sun, was seen from 375 million light years away warping and spiralling into the gravitational pull of a supermassive black hole, researchers said in The Astrophysical Journal.
It was then sucked into oblivion in a rare cosmic occurrence astronomers call a tidal disruption event.
NASA’s planet-searching telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite – TESS – captured the detailed timeline from beginning to end for the first time.
Astronomers used a worldwide network of telescopes to detect the phenomenon before looking at TESS, whose permanent viewing zones designed to find distant planets, caught the beginning of the violent event.
Thomas Holoien, an astronomer for the Carnegie Institution for Science who led the research, said: “This was really a combination of both being good and being lucky, and sometimes that’s what you need to push the science forward.”
Stars get sucked in when they venture too close to a supermassive black hole, which lives at the center of most galaxies, including the Earth’s Milky Way.
The black hole’s impressive gravitational forces tear the star apart, with some of its material thrown into space and the rest into the black hole, forming a disc of hot, bright gas as it is swallowed.
Mr Holoien added: “Specifically, we are able to measure the rate at which it gets brighter after it starts brightening, and we also observed a drop in its temperature and brightness that is unique.”
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