Black hole seen violently shredding ‘hapless star’ and devouring it, astronomers say

A star’s final moments were witnessed by astronomers as a black hole “violently” ripped it to shreds and gobbled up its celestial remains, NASA’s Goddard Space Center reports.

The scene of devastation was recorded March 1, when NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope saw “a very bright, hot, donut-shaped area of gas that was once the star” that was as large as our solar system and “swirling around a black hole.”

This massive smear — visible only with ultraviolet light technology — amounted to the oozing guts of a dead star, the center said.

“Black holes ... lie in wait until a hapless star wanders by. When the star gets close enough, the black hole’s gravitational grasp violently rips it apart and sloppily devours its gasses while belching out intense radiation,” NASA reported in a Jan. 12 news release.

“These are termed ‘tidal disruption events.’ But the wording belies the complex, raw violence of a black hole encounter,” NASA said. “There is a balance between the black hole’s gravity pulling in star stuff, and radiation blowing material out.

“In other words, black holes are messy eaters.”

The killer black hole is located about 300 million light-years from Earth, in the ESO 583-G004 galaxy, NASA said.

It’s estimated such star shredding events happen only a couple of times “every 100,000 years,” NASA says. Evidence of as many as 100 tidal disruptions has been found by astronomers, but this latest instance was different.

“Usually astronomers get just a few observations at the beginning of a disruption event when its very bright, but this energetic collision’s proximity and brightness allowed Hubble to gather ultraviolet data over a longer than normal period,” NASA said. “This is a rare opportunity for scientists to create models of what they think is going on and then compare those models with what Hubble sees.”

Peter Maksym of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said the team of astronomers is still struggling to comprehend what it witnessed.

“We’re looking somewhere on the edge of that doughnut. We’re seeing a stellar wind from the black hole sweeping over the surface that’s being projected towards us at speeds of 20 million miles per hour (three percent the speed of light),” Maksym said in the release..

“We really are still getting our heads around the event. You shred the star and then it’s got this material that’s making its way into the black hole,” Maksym said. “And so you’ve got models where you think you know what is going on, and then you’ve got what you actually see.

“This is an exciting place for scientists to be: right at the interface of the known and the unknown.”

This story was originally published January 13, 2023 at 1:58 PM with the headline "Black hole seen violently shredding ‘hapless star’ and devouring it, astronomers say."