The POTwith images captured by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) telescopes, the Palomar Observatory in southern California and the space agency’s own Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescopic Array (NuSTAR), captured the moment when a black hole devoured a star.
According to the report published on the website of Aristegui Newsthe shots of the different telescopes showed how the star got too close to the black hole.
These holes in space are finite regions that have a high enough concentration of mass inside them to generate such a gravitational field that no particle, not even light, can escape from it. In this case, the “victim” was this star.
Ten million times bigger than our Sun
The report added that the phenomenon was captured in a galaxy located 250 million light years from Earth and that the black hole is about 10 million times the mass of our Sun.
The devoured star gradually moved closer to the hole until it disappeared and, once the astronomical object’s gravity destroyed it completely, the researchers saw an increase in high-energy X-ray light around the black hole, a process known as tidal disruption event.
Basically, the tidal disruption event is that as stellar material was pulled in, an extremely hot structure called the corona formed.
The scientists observed that the side of the star closest to the black hole was taken more strongly than the side that was farther away. While this was happening, all the material was separated until nothing was left but a thread of hot gas.
This is the fifth closest sighting of a star-destroying black hole ever observed. NASA believes that these types of findings can help to decipher how the gravity of black holes manipulates the material around them, creating lights and new physical features.
