Black hole nibbles on star
A star has survived a close brush with a black hole, only to be slowly devoured. Recent observations from X-ray telescopes Chandra and XMM-Newton have revealed the dramatic story of a red giant which drifted too close to the black hole at the centre of its galaxy. The star was captured by the black hole, which then stripped away the outer layers of the red giant’s gas until only a white dwarf remained.
The black hole continues to nibble away the star’s gas, creating bright bursts of X-rays as it does so. As the star continues to lose mass, it slowly drifts away, but it will never quite escape the black hole’s grasp.
“The black hole will eat it more and more slowly, but never stop,” says Andrew King from the University of Leicester, who led the study. “In principle, this loss of mass would continue until and even after the white dwarf dwindled down to the mass of Jupiter, in about a trillion years. This would be a remarkably slow and convoluted way for the Universe to make a planet!”
http://chandra.si.edu