Scientists see black hole eating star for first time

An artist’s representation of the event

Using advanced telescopes focused on a pair of colliding
galaxies nearly 150 million light-years from
Earth, astronomers have for the first time watched as a star
was “eaten” by a black hole.

It was seen “gobbling a star twice the size of the Sun”, says
Sky News, and then ejecting a “rapid jet of
particles”. The star had drifted into the gravitational field of
the black hole, which is itself 20 million times bigger than
the Sun.

Only a small number of  stellar deaths, called tidal
disruption events (TDEs) have been detected and none has been
witnessed, “although scientists have hypothesised that they may be
a more common occurrence”, says Phys.org.

Theoretical astrophysicists “believe that material pulled from
the doomed stars forms a rotating disk around the black hole,
emitting intense radiation and shoots powerful jets of material
from the poles of the disk, close to the speed of light”, says Sky
News.

Seppo Mattila of the University of Turku in Finland and Miguel
Perez-Torres of the Astrophysical Institute of Andalusia in Spain
led a team of 36 scientists from 26 institutions around the world
in the observations of the galaxies, between them known as Arp
299.

The scientists said the discovery of the TDE was particularly
surprising.