Scientists Discover A Black Hole Eat A Star And Spit Some Of It Back Out For The First Time Ever

For the first time, a black hole has been caught in the act of swallowing a star that got too close and ejecting a flare of matter moving at nearly the speed of light – a process that’s been compared to a cosmic ‘burp’. Witnessed by an international team of astrophysicists led by a Johns Hopkins University scientist, the finding reported Thursday in the journal Science.

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. They then saw a high-speed flare get thrust out, escaping from the rim of the black hole.

Scientists have seen black holes swallowing stars before and they’ve also separately detected these mysterious jets of matter blasting out, but until now no one had been fast enough with their telescopes to link the two events, and were never able to witness them occurring in sequence. “These events are extremely rare. 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,” van Velzen said , who led the analysis. “Previous efforts to find evidence for these jets, including my own, were late to the game,” he added.

Until recently, it was assumed that black holes had such strong gravity that nothing, not even light, could escape them. But researchers such as Stephen Hawking and Gerard’t Hooft have been able to show that energy can escape a black hole, and now it seems that matter can escape from near the event horizon too. The unlucky star that was gobbled up was around the size of our Sun, and the black hole in question was a relatively light one, located at the centre of a galaxy around 300 million light-years away.

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.

Straight after that, van Velzen and a group of international researchers jumped on the event, and pointed a bunch of radio telescopes in the direction of the galaxy as fast as possible, in the hopes of catching the erupting plasma jet they predicted would soon follow. They were just in time to catch the action, and the team was able to witness the event from a range of satellites and telescopes, creating a picture of the event in X-ray, radio, and optical signals.

The team is now sure that the sudden burst of light that they saw came from a trapped star. They first had to rule out that it was coming from the “accretion disk” that is often seen when a star is newly-trapped.

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