Star Eaten Alive by Supermassive Black Hole

An artist's illustration shows a supermassive black hole.

This rare event on the supermassive black hole had shown what scientists had said that a black hole would release hot matter and particles as they escape from its mouth when the black hole engulfs a star, Forbes reported.

"But this is the first time we got a clear view of the stellar destruction, followed by the jet", van Velzen said.

Led by Sjoet van Velzen, a Hubble fellow at Johns Hopkins University, the researchers published their findings in the journal Science.

Previously, scientists have seen black holes gulping stars and have also separately found these baffling jets of matter blasting out, but so far, no one had been so fast with their telescopes to successfully relate the two events, and had never witnessed them taking place in sequence.

"Previous efforts to find evidence for these jets, including my own, were late to the game", adds van Velzen, who led the analysis and coordinated the efforts of 13 other scientists in the United States, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Australia. They are notorious for breaking the usual laws of physics in the universe and bending or even distorting space and time.

The researchrs ruled out the possibility that the light being beamed out was from something called an "accretion disk", which forms when a black hole is sucking up matter from space, and that then supported the hypothesis that the jet was indeed from a sucked up star.

Along with researchers from the University of Oxford, van Velzen used different telescopes to gather optical, radio and X-ray signals from the event as it unfolded.

The scientists tracked a star about as big as our sun as it was pulled from its normal path and into that of a super massive black hole before being eaten up. When this happens, a plasma jet escapes, made from magnetic field particles that are emanating from the event horizon of the black hole itself. The "bleachers" were up to a billion light years away. However, the proximity of the black hole to the earth helped the astronomers in making the present discovery by launching the study as soon as the event was first seen.

The black hole that the researches studied was relative small and weak as far as black holes are concerned, but it is also still big enough to completely consumer a star. "From our observations, we learn the streams of stellar debris can organise and make a jet rather quickly, which is valuable input for constructing a complete theory of these events".