Nasa catches huge black hole swallowing star
WASHINGTON: Scientists have captured a view of a colossal black hole violently ripping apart a doomed star, illustrating an extraordinary and chaotic cosmic event from beginning to end for the first time, using Nasa’s planet-hunting telescope.
The US space agency’s orbiting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, better known as Tess, revealed the detailed timeline of a star 375 million light years away warping and spiralling into the unrelenting gravitational pull of a super-massive black hole, researchers said.
The star, roughly the same size as our sun, was eventually sucked into oblivion in a rare cosmic occurrence that astronomers call a tidal disruption event.
Astronomers used an international network of telescopes to detect the phenomenon before turning to Tess, whose permanent viewing zones designed to hunt distant planets caught the beginning of the violent event, proving its unique method of surveying the cosmos effective.
“This was really a combination of both being good and being lucky, and sometimes that’s what you need to push the science forward,” said astronomer Thomas Holoien of the Carnegie Institution for Science.
Such phenomena happen when a star ventures too close to a super-massive black hole, objects which reside at the centre of most large galaxies including our Milky Way.
The black hole’s tremendous gravitational forces tear the star to shreds, with some of its material tossed into space and the rest plunging into the black hole.