For the first time ever, astronomers say they've borne witness to a supermassive black hole consuming a star.
Two papers released this week by the journal Nature describe powerful blasts of radiation whose brightness and behaviour can only be explained by a Sun-sized star being torn apart by the gravitational forces of a black hole at the centre of its galaxy, the authors say.
Scientists believe they have seen the aftermath of such stellar violence before, in the form of fading glows emanating from distant galaxies, in whose centres supermassive black holes usually reside. But they had never caught one in the act.
"This was the first time we saw one of these big black holes going from quiet and silent to very loud and noisy - producing a lot of light and radiation," said Davide Lazzati, an astrophysicist at North Carolina State University who was not involved in the study.
Ashley Zauderer, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who led the second study, which focused on the radio wave emissions, recalled thinking, "This is crazy."
"I didn't believe it," she said. "I called a colleague and said, 'Will you make sure I didn't make a mistake? Look at this data, it's too bright.'"
Zauderer's radio-wave study mapped the location of the burst to the centre of the galaxy, right where a black hole ought to be.
The astronomers were very lucky to witness this event. It so happened that the jet of radiation was blasting straight toward the Swift spacecraft, like a flashlight beamed in the face.
The likelihood of seeing another star get swallowed up is slim, Burrows said, but that won't keep the team from looking - especially now that they have an idea of what to look for.
"It might happen once every 10,000 years in a galaxy with a supermassive black hole in the centre," Burrows said. "But there are a lot of galaxies out there in the sky."
Watch the animated effect and reaction of the black hole generated by NASA
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald
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