For the first time - watching the entire process of a star being swallowed by a black hole until the plasma jets are emitted

An international team of astrophysicists have seen for the first time a star swallowed by a black hole when in the process a flare of material moving at a speed close to the speed of light is emitted. The findings were published for the first time at the space conference in Jerusalem last month

An international team of astrophysicists led by scientists from Johns Hopkins University saw for the first time a star swallowed by a black hole and emitting a flare of material moving at speeds close to the speed of light.

The finding, reported in the journal Science, describes tracking a star - about the size of our sun - that is veered off its normal course, slips into the gravity of a supermassive black hole and is sucked into it. Says Siwaker van Welzen, the Hubble Fellow at Johns Hopkins University.

"These events are extremely rare," Van Veltzen. This is the first time that we see all the stages from the destruction of the star to the ejection of the conical jet, a process spread over several months."
Black holes are bodies whose volume is so dense that their gravity cannot be resisted. It has matter, gas and even light trapped inside it and therefore it becomes invisible. Astrophysicists who predicted that when a black hole swallows a large amount of gas, in this case an entire star, it will emit after the meal a jet of plasma (a state of aggregation in which the material also creates a magnetic field) moving rapidly from material that managed to escape from the black hole's rim or "event horizon". The study shows that this prediction was correct," the scientists said.

"Previous attempts to find evidence of this phenomenon, including mine, failed because we arrived late to the game"
said Van Veltzen, who led the analysis and coordinated a group of 13 other scientists from the United States, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Australia.
Supermassive Black Holes The largest black holes are at the center of most massive galaxies, including the Milky Way. It is actually one of the lighter supermassive black holes, weighing only a million solar masses, but it still has enough power to swallow a star.

The first observation of the destroyed star was made by a team at Ohio State University, using the Optical Telescope in Hawaii. The team announced its discovery on Twitter in early December 2014. After reading about the event, Van Waltzen contacted a team of British astrophysicists led by Rob Pender of the University of Oxford, the group that used radio telescopes that were in a position that allowed them to follow the star as quickly as possible. And indeed they arrived just in time to catch the action.
At the same time, the members of the international team collected data from satellites and ground telescopes in the fields of X-ray, radio and optical signals, multiwave precision of the event. The quick mobilization helped, especially this was important because the galaxy in question is closer to Earth than those in which a jet formed after the destruction of a star (without the absorption phase itself) was discovered. The galaxy is about 300 million light-years distant] while the previous galaxies were at least three times more distant.
The first step of the international team members was to rule out the possibility that the light was due to a mass of dust and matter constantly swirling around a black hole, a product known as a "probability disk" that creates a black hole that sucks material from space. This allowed them to confirm the assumption that the sudden increase in the light intensity of the galaxy was due to the capture of a new star by the black hole.

"The destruction of a star by a black hole is an incredibly complicated process, and far from being understood," Van Welzen said. "From our observations we learned how the debris from the star can eject and become a jet quite quickly, a valuable data for building a complete theory of this type of events."
Van Veltzen Sein last year completed his doctoral thesis at Radboud University in the Netherlands, where he studied emissions from supermassive black holes. In the last line of the dissertation, he expressed his hope to discover these events within four years. It turned out that he managed to do this only a few months after the ceremony to protect his work."

Van Welzen and his team weren't the only ones hunting for radio signals from this particular lucky star. A group at Harvard identified it using Internet radio telescopes and announced their results online. Both groups presented their results in a workshop during the IAC conference in Jerusalem in early November. It was the first time the two competing teams had met face-to-face.

"At the meeting we had a fruitful exchange of ideas about this source. Van Veltzen said. We are still on good terms. I even went on a long walk near the King's Sea with the head of the competing group."

For information on the Johns Hopkins University website

for the scientific article

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