An amazing animation just released by NASA depicts the unbelievable power of a black hole as it tears apart a star — something scientists are witnessing happen in real life.
The short animation shows what happens to a star as it drifts toward a black hole and becomes trapped by its gravitational pull, according to a Huffington Post report.
The black hole pulls the star apart and swallows it hole, but the story doesn’t end there, said Jelle Kaastra, who is from the Institute for Space Research in the Netherlands, in a statement. Most people might be surprised to find that a black hole actually can’t keep up with the pace with which it sucks in all that matter from the star, and it must eject a portion of it very violently. This is called a pulsar, and it is the brightest known thing in space.
NASA based the animation on a recent study published in the journal Nature describing an event known as ASASSN-14li, which is about 290 million light years from us and was first discovered by scientists last November. A star drifted too close to a black hole in a tidal disruption event as tidal forces pull the star to pieces, sucking some of it inside the black hole and ejecting the rest into space. The researchers have been using X-ray telescopes that orbit Earth to make these observations.
It’s a fascinating thing for scientists to view because it shows that black holes aren’t the infinite prisons that people think of them as, and that just because something slips beyond the event horizon doesn’t mean it can’t be ejected back out. Some even theorize that matter that enters the black hole enters an alternate universe, a hypothesis championed by none other than physicist Stephen Hawking.
A statement posted on the University of Maryland’s website describes the findings. It can be found here.