As big fish eat little fish in the Earth’s vast oceans, so too do super massive black holes in different galaxies, gorge on smaller black holes and stars, making themselves more massive in the process. A giant black hole has been caught red-handed dipping into a cosmic cookie jar of stars by NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer. This is the first time astronomers have seen the whole process of a black hole eating a star, from its first to nearly final bites. This is what happens to the unlucky stars that wander into the wrong neighborhood.
Now, with all the data from Galaxy Evolution Explorer astronomers have the smoking gun proof of a supermassive black hole ripping apart a star and consuming every portion of it. Astronomers believe a doomed star came too close to a giant black hole and as it neared the enormous gravity of the black hole, tidal forces stretched the star until it was torn apart. This discovery provides crucial information about how these black holes grow and affect surrounding stars and gas.
Stars can survive being stretched a small amount, as they are in binary star systems, but this star was stretched beyond its breaking point and swallowed. Now scientists can observe these events with ultraviolet light, it’s only now they’ve got a new tool for finding more.
This will help us greatly in weighing black holes in the universe, and in understanding how they feed and grow in their host galaxies as the universe evolves. Observations like these are urgently needed to determine how quickly black holes can grow by swallowing neighboring stars.
Via: Sciencedaily
