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NASA reveals close-up view of black hole eating up star leaving 'nothing but a long noodle of hot gas'

The gravitational pull of the black hole sucked the wandering star into it, creating what's called a tidal disruption event

WASHINGTON, DC: NASA has been observing what is called tidal disruption event for more than a year now, where the agency observes what happens to a wandering star if it gets too close to a black hole, ‘unusually close.’ On Tuesday, December 20, its Jet Propulsion Laboratory said that recently its multiple telescopes watched a massive black hole, which was over 10 times the mass of our Sun. It is located about 250 million light-years away from Earth and was the fifth-closest observation of such an occurrence. It was first recorded by NASA on March 1, 2021, and shared by the space agency.

Now, what did its Jet Propulsion Laboratory find out about the star and the black hole crossing paths? NASA answers, it’s sure a slow process and is not a single-moment phenomenon. It observes that it can take weeks or months for the black hole’s gravity to suck in and consume the star’s being. The record shows that the most recent finding happened over the course of about five-and-a-half months. 

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"The side of the star nearest the black hole was pulled harder than the far side of the star, stretching the entire thing apart and leaving nothing but a long noodle of hot gas," said NASA. The entire study of this event was labeled AT2021ehb, and published in the Astrophysical Journal in September. Suvi Gezari, co-author mentioned, "Tidal disruption events are a sort of cosmic laboratory. They're our window into the real-time feeding of a massive black hole lurking in the center of a galaxy."

The study also talked about how this event not just gave an opportunity to closely observe this occurrence, but also an ‘unprecedented view, of one element of the process – the formation of a corona. This could happen only as the star was destroyed and spawned a ‘dramatic rise’ in high-energy X-ray light, said NASA, reports CBS News.

Yuhan Yao, a Caltech graduate student and lead author of the study, weighed in by saying it was more than a ‘rare occurrence’, it’s a completely new finding. "We've never seen a tidal disruption event with X-ray emission like this without a jet present, and that's really spectacular because it means we can potentially disentangle what causes jets and what causes coronae," they said. "Our observations of AT2021ehb are in agreement with the idea that magnetic fields have something to do with how the corona forms, and we want to know what's causing that magnetic field to get so strong."