spacetoday.net: Astronomers see black hole consume star

Posted: Thu, Feb 19, 2004, 2:02 PM ET (1902 GMT)
RXJ1242 galaxy black hole and disrupted star illustration (NASA)

Astronomers reported Wednesday they had evidence for the first time of a black hole ripping apart and consuming a star. Both NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton x-ray telescopes detected a strong x-ray outburst in the center of the galaxy RXJ1242-11, about 700 million light years from the Earth. Astronomers believe that this surge of x-rays is linked to the destruction of a star that passed too close to a supermassive black hole in the center of that galaxy. The power tidal forces of the black hole's gravity ripped apart the star, and a small fraction of the star's mass — about one percent — fell into the black hole, generating x-rays as it approached the black hole and heated up. The combination of the high spatial resolution of Chandra and the high spectral resolution of XMM-Newton allowed astronomers to pin down the nature of the x-ray surge and link it to a disrupted star for the first time.