NASA's Hubble space telescope records star gobbling by black hole
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 13 (Xinhua) -- Astronomers using NASA's Hubble space telescope have recorded a star's final moments in detail as it gets gobbled up by a black hole.
Astronomers are using Hubble to find out the details of what happens when a wayward star plunges into the gravitational abyss, said NASA on Thursday.
About 100 tidal disruption events around black holes have been detected by astronomers using various telescopes. NASA reported that several of its high-energy space observatories spotted another black hole tidal disruption event on March 1 of 2021, and it happened in another galaxy.
Unlike Hubble observations, data was collected in X-ray light from an extremely hot corona around the black hole that formed after the star was already torn apart, according to NASA.
For any given galaxy with a quiescent supermassive black hole at the center, it is estimated that the stellar shredding happens only a few times in every 100,000 years, according to NASA.
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