Scientists have for the first time witnessed a black hole swallow a star and then quickly eject a flare of stellar debris moving at nearly light speed.
Astrophysicists tracked the star—about the size of our sun—as it shifted from its customary path, slipped into the gravitational pull of a supermassive black hole, and was sucked in, says Sjoert van Velzen, a Hubble fellow at Johns Hopkins University.
“These events are extremely rare,” says van Velzen, lead author of the study published in the journal Science. “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.”
Artist's conception of a star drawn toward a black hole and destroyed, and the black hole soon thereafter emitting a "jet" of plasma from debris left by the star's destruction. Credit: Modified from an original image by Amadeo Bachar
