Astronomers get first glimpse of black hole swallowing star, shooting flare

An international team of scientists said Thursday they have for the first time caught a black hole swallowing a star and shooting out a high-speed flare of matter at the center of a nearby galaxy.

The finding, reported in the U.S. journal Science, tracked this unlucky star -- about the size of the Sun -- as it shifted from its customary path, slipped into the gravitational pull of a supermassive black hole and was sucked in, said lead author Sjoert van Velzen of the Johns Hopkins University.

Though extremely rare, supermassive black holes have been spotted previously eating a star alive. Scientists have also seen flares, or jets, from supermassive black holes.

"But this is the first time we first get a clear view of the stellar destruction, followed by the jet," van Velzen said in an email to Xinhua. "The jet is also of much lower power than what we have seen before, which is present an interesting puzzle."

Van Velzen led the analysis and coordinated the efforts of 13 other scientists in the United States, the Netherlands, Britain and Australia. The team compared the energy produced by the jet in this event to the entire energy output of the Sun over 10 million years.

They concluded that it was likely all supermassive black holes swallowing stars launched jets but this discovery was made possible because the black hole is relatively close to the Earth and was studied soon after it was first seen.

The black hole is only 300 million light-years away from the Earth and the team was able to make their first observations using radio telescopes only three weeks after it was found, they said.

"Previous efforts to find evidence for these jets, including my own, were late to the game," said van Velzen.

"Our new findings suggest that this new type of jet could indeed be common," he said. "Finding more of these rare events may further our understanding of the processes that allow black holes to launch such spectacular outflows." Endit