NASA Captures a Black Hole Ripping Apart a Star

A team of researchers from the Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington, have discovered a strange phenomenon inside a star located 375 million light-years away from the Earth, Reuters reported on Monday.

Thomas Holoien, an astronomer at the cited institute led the research work and said that “This was really a combination of both being good and being lucky, and sometimes that’s what you need to push the science forward”.

With the help of NASA’s planet-hunting telescope, the researchers witnessed an event where a star was violently ripped apart by a supermassive black hole.

According to the researchers, the distance of the star was confirmed by NASA’s orbiting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, called as TESS.

The rare cosmic phenomenon is described as a tidal disruption event by the astronomers where the star is roughly believed to be the same size as Earth’s sun, the researchers added. The astronomers used an international network of satellites to confirm the event before switching to TESS for further study.

TESS captured the beginning of the phenomenon proving effective its unique method of surveilling the cosmos.

According to scitechdaily, Other than Mr Holoien, the research team also included Decker French, Thomas Connor, Nidia Morrell, Andrew Newman, and Gwen Rudie, as well as Carnegie-Princeton Fellow Rachael Beaton.

The research work was published in the Astrophysical Journal.