WASHINGTON: Scientists have for the first time witnessed a black hole swallowing a star in a galaxy 300 million light years away and ejecting a flare of matter moving at nearly the speed of light.
The finding tracks the star – about the size of our Sun – as it shifts from its customary path, slips into the gravitational pull of a super massive black hole and is sucked in, said Sjoert van Velzen, a Hubble fellow at the Johns Hopkins University in US. “It’s the first time we see everything from the stellar destruction followed by the launch of a conical outflow, also called a jet, and we watched it unfold over several months,” van Velzen said.
