Blast Appears to Be From Black Hole Destroying Star

Two space observatories have provided the first strong evidence of a supermassive black hole stretching, tearing apart and partially gobbling up a star flung within reach of its enormous gravity, astronomers said Wednesday.

The event had long been predicted but never confirmed.

A powerful X-ray blast drew the attention of astronomers to the event near the center of a galaxy about 700 million light-years from Earth. The international team of astronomers thinks gases from the star, heated to multimillion-degree temperatures as they fell toward the black hole near the heart of galaxy RX J1242-11, produced the blast.

Astronomers said a star about the size of our sun neared the black hole after veering off-course following a close encounter with another star. The tremendous gravity of the black hole, estimated to have a mass 100 million times that of our sun, then stretched the star to the point of breaking.

“This is the ultimate David versus Goliath battle, but here David loses,” said Gunther Hasinger of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.

Astronomers used NASA’s Chandra and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatories to capture the event. Similar events are estimated to occur once every 10,000 years in a typical galaxy.

The blast first was seen in 1992 and remains visible as it fades, said Chandra press scientist Peter Edmonds, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.