Black hole swallowing and ripping apart star captured for first time

CALIFORNIA, US: A gigantic black hole has been captured pulling in and ripping apart a star for the first time.

The star, which was about the same size as our sun, was seen from 375 million light years away warping and spiralling into the gravitational pull of a supermassive black hole, researchers said in the Astrophysical Journal.

It was then sucked into oblivion in a rare cosmic occurrence astronomers call a tidal disruption event. NASA's planet-searching telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite - TESS - captured the detailed timeline from beginning to end for the first time.

Astronomers used a worldwide network of telescopes to detect the phenomenon before looking at TESS, whose permanent viewing zones designed to find distant planets, caught the beginning of the violent event.

Thomas Holoien, an astronomer for the Carnegie Institution for Science who led the research, said: "This was really a combination of both being good and being lucky, and sometimes that's what you need to push the science forward." Stars get sucked in when they venture too close to a supermassive black hole, which lives at the centre of most galaxies, including the Earth's Milky Way.