Black hole eating a Star — Scientists record last moments of the Dying star

Black holes have always intrigued curiosity amongst all. I remember back at school when I was in the eleventh grade, I delivered a long speech on black holes which I was very well appreciated for. Back then I thought to myself that my talk must have been fantastic. It didn’t take me long to realize that the major appreciation I received wasn’t for the talk but the content of the talk. Yes! it was the supernatural rather bewildering nature of the black holes that left a jaw dropping expression all around. Not that I knew much about them, it was an accumulation of a few astonishing black hole facts picked up from the internet that I spoke about. It was that day when it hit me hard that there is a lot that we are unaware of. A lot that needs to be explored. A lot that needs to be discovered. We live in an extremely limited zone of thinking. And its high time we shift our consciousness to the magic happening all around. Within us as well as around us.

It was 3 years ago, April 2017 to be precise, when scientists and astronomers used a telescope of the size of a planet to create the first image of a black hole which is more than 50 million light years away in the heart of a galaxy called Messier 87. For sure, it created a storm all over the internet with the hype over black holes sky rocketing to its peak. As per the official reports, the researchers constructed this image by combining and simulating radio frequency signals which they had collected from the observatories all across Earth. And it took them over two years to assemble this spectacular reality.

And now very recently, another news is doing rounds on the internet which says, an extremely rare blast of glare and light, has been emitted by a star as it is swallowed by a supermassive black hole. It has been spotted by scientists using telescopes from all around the world.

Isn’t it mind boggling? Just imagine the visual of a burning star being sucked in by a monstrous, gigantic, blackhole! I mean wow. This is something that I thought could only be seen in movies. Never imagined one fine day science and technology will reach this milestone. This phenomenon, which is also known as a tidal disruption event, is the closest flare of its kind that has been yet recorded. And this is occurring around 215 million light-years away from Earth. Well that indeed is way too far. This happens when a star passes too close to a black hole and the extreme gravitational pull from the black hole shreds the star into thin streams of material, a process officially called as ‘spaghettification’. Its during this process, that some of the material falls into the black hole, releasing a bright, luminous and shiny flare of energy which astronomers can detect very clearly.

“Several sky surveys discovered emission from the new tidal disruption event very quickly after the star was ripped apart. We immediately pointed a suite of ground-based and space telescopes in that direction to see how the light was produced.”-Thomas Wevers from the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, UK.

Researchers say that these Tidal disruption events are rare and not always easy to study because they are usually obstructed by a curtain of dust and debris. An international team of scientists studied this event minutely. It was for a very short time that the flare was detected, after the star was ripped apart into mere gases. Researchers monitored this flare, named AT2019qiz, for over six-months as it grew brighter and .. Read More