Distant black hole rips apart a star that wandered too close

Astronomers have observed a black hole has torn apart a star that wandered too close to it, more than halfway across the known universe.

The event was described by astronomers on Wednesday (November 30) in the journals Nature and Nature Astronomy.

Tidal disruption event

A black hole tore apart a passing star in an event known as tidal disruption. This is the fourth time, and the first since 2011, that scientists have observed a star being shredded by a black hole.

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According to researchers, the recent event is the furthest and brightest one on record. Luminous jets of high-energy particles were launched in opposite directions into space.

Researchers believe the culprit to be a supermassive black hole, about 8.5 billion light years away from the Earth and about hundreds of millions of times the mass of the Sun.

Astronomer Igor Andreoni from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, a lead author on one of the studies, said: “We think that the star was similar to our sun, perhaps more massive but of a common kind.”

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The event was detected in February 2022 using a camera attached to a telescope at California’s Palomar Observatory. European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, was used to calculate the distance.