Astronomers have captured a Black Hole swallowing a star with its strong inescapable gravitational pull and a hot flare of matter was noticed by the team, proving a strong evidence of the destruction of star. The phenomenon noticed by the study author Sjoert van Velzen, a Hubble fellow at Johns Hopkins University, can be compared to a hot plasma burp. The star was similar in the size to our sun. The star shifted from its customary path and slipped into the gravitational pull of a supermassive black hole.
Professor Velzen was helped by an international team of astronomers and the research paper has been published in the journal Science. A star being swallowed by a black hole has been witnessed for the first time along with a clear indication of ejections of matter, moving at the speed of light.
Astronomers believe that Supermassive black holes exist at the center of all massive galaxies. Their pull is much stronger compared to black holes and can gulp stars and other matter with their gravitational pull.
The first observation of the star being destroyed was made by a team at the Ohio State University, using an optical telescope in Hawaii. That team announced its discovery on Twitter in early December 2014.
The research paper said...
"Previous efforts to find evidence for these jets, including my own, were late to the game," said van Velzen, who led the analysis and coordinated the efforts of 13 other scientists in the United States, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Australia.
Supermassive black holes, the largest of black holes, are believed to exist at the center of most massive galaxies. This particular one lies at the lighter end of the supermassive black hole spectrum, at only about a million times the mass of our sun, but still packing the force to gobble a star.
The first step for the international team was to rule out the possibility that the light was from a pre-existing expansive swirling mass called an "accretion disk" that forms when a black hole is sucking in matter from space. That helped to confirm that the sudden increase of light from the galaxy was due to a newly trapped star.
"The destruction of a star by a black hole is beautifully complicated, and far from understood," van Velzen said. "From our observations, we learn the streams of stellar debris can organize and make a jet rather quickly, which is valuable input for constructing a complete theory of these events."
Van Velzen last year completed his doctoral dissertation at Radboud University in the Netherlands, where he studied jets from supermassive black holes. In the last line of the dissertation, he expressed his hope to discover these events within four years. It turned out to take only a few months after the ceremony for his dissertation defense.
Van Velzen and his team were not the only ones to hunt for radio signals from this particular unlucky star. A group at Harvard observed the same source with radio telescopes in New Mexico and announced its results online. Both teams presented results at a workshop in Jerusalem in early November. It was the first time the two competing teams had met face to face.