Black holes are called black holes for a reason. These celestial members are those dense areas of space that have gravitational pulls to such extreme degrees that neither light nor any matter can pass through them. This is the reason why it is always difficult to study these. They just keep hiding there in the vastness as huge voids.
Recently an international team of researchers has observed one such black hole swallowing up a star and this has been observed for the very first time. This event took place over several months; hence over a period of 12 months the research team got a chance to study this amazing event in order to test the theory that when a large volume of gas is pulled in by such an object, a fast moving jet of plasma travelling at close to the speed of light escapes from near the black hole rim.
The black hole that the team studied was a massive one with a mass one million times that of our sun and located at a distance of 300 million light years. It was in December 2014 that the event was first spotted at the Ohio State University by astronomers who were using an optical telescope in Hawaii. After this, a team from UK’s University of Oxford turned their telescopes in the direction of the object and caught the event in the nick of time.
Due to this combined effort, it became possible to gather radio, optical and X-ray data which in turn contributed to provide a supreme quality, detailed and valuable record of the event. Based on all the data received, the researchers were able to prove with the multi-wavelength portrait that the increased light emission was the result of a newly trapped star. This in turn proved the existing theories regarding such events.
John Hopkins University’s Sjoert van Velzen said: “The destruction of a star by a black hole is beautifully complicated, and far from understood. 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.”
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Author:Technology and Beyond
