May 4, 2012

Stellar Homicide: Watch This Black Hole Destroy a Star (Video)

A team of astronomers at Johns Hopkins University recently used space and ground-based telescopes to capture the death of a star that was “shredded” by the gravity of a supermassive black hole.

This violent event itself was no space oddity. Black holes routinely swallow stars. Yet it is rare for us to get a visualization, which shows us who the ‘victim’ is. In this case the star is one that is rich in helium gas and is located in a galaxy 2.7 billion light-years away.

According to NASA, this is “the most direct evidence yet of a supermassive black hole shredding a star that wandered too close.”

Watch the computer simulation here:

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with

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