The Hubble Space Telescope has just discovered a hungry black hole twisting an unfortunate star.
Black holes violently trap everything within their reach, causing intense flashes of light, until whatever crosses the event horizon is hidden forever.
Recently, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured in detail the moment when an unlucky star was engulfed by a black hole, located 300 million light-years away in the heart of the galaxy ESO 583- G004.
The last moments were recorded of a star that got too close and was pulled in by the strong gravitational force of the black hole.
It is not the first time that an event of this type has been captured, in fact, there are at least a hundred detections of tidal disturbances around black holes using various telescopes.
"However, there are still very few tidal events that are observed in ultraviolet light given the observing time. This is really unfortunate because there's a lot of information that you can get from the ultraviolet spectra," Emily Engelthaler, from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said.
"We're excited because we can get these details about what the debris is doing. The tidal event can tell us a lot about a black hole."
Changes in the status of the doomed star are occurring on the order of days or months.
