First glimpse of black hole ‘eating star’, ejecting flare

Scientists have for the first time witnessed a black hole swallowing a star in a galaxy 300 million light years away and ejecting a flare of matter moving at nearly the speed of light.

The finding tracks the star, about the size of our Sun, as it shifts from its customary path, slips into the gravitational pull of a super massive black hole and is sucked in, said Sjoert van Velzen, a Hubble fellow at the Johns Hopkins University in US.

“It’s the first time we see everything from the stellar destruction followed by the launch of a conical outflow, also called a jet, and we watched it unfold over several months,” van Velzen said. 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. Astrophysicists had predicted that when a black hole is force-fed a large amount of gas, in this case a whole star, then a fast-moving jet of plasma, elementary particles in a magnetic field, can escape from near the black hole rim. This study suggests this prediction was correct, the scientists said.

Super massive black holes, the largest of black holes, are believed to exist at the centre of most massive galaxies. This particular one lies at the lighter end of the super massive black hole spectrum, at only about a million times the mass of our Sun.