The black hole that swallowed a star, then burped a bit back up

Astronomers have caught black holes in the act of murdering stars before. But a study published Thursday in Science claims to have caught a step in the crime that has remained elusive until now.

In addition to catching evidence of the star’s destruction — an inevitable death caused by the massive, inescapable gravitational pull of a dense supermassive black hole — the scientists saw a hot flare of matter escape from the scene of the crime.

You can basically think of it as a hot plasma burp.

The researchers say this is the first time anyone has picked up the radio signal produced by this jet of escaping matter. These black hole jets have been seen before, but they’ve never been directly linked to a star being torn apart — and the phenomenon remains mysterious.

“These events are extremely rare,” study author Sjoert van Velzen, a Hubble fellow at Johns Hopkins University, said in a statement.

The deceased star was quite similar to our own, but sat a staggering 300 million light years away. It was done in by the type of supermassive black hole thought to sit in the centre of most galaxies — including our own.