In 2019, astronomers witnessed the signal of a star that got too close to a black hole and was destroyed by the black hole’s gravitational forces. Once shredded, the star’s remains began circling the black hole in a disc shape in a type of “stellar graveyard”. Over a few years, however, this disc has expanded outwards and is now directly in the path of a star, or possibly a stellar-mass black hole, orbiting the massive black hole at a previously safe distance. “As the star orbits around the black hole, it does this over and over again.”Scientists have long documented many cases where an object gets too close to a black hole and gets torn apart in a single burst of light. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Centre controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.

Source: The Star October 09, 2024 23:36 UTC