Distant black hole is caught in the act of annihilating a star - KSL.com

WASHINGTON — Astronomers have detected an act of extreme violence more than halfway across the known universe as a black hole shreds a star that wandered too close to this celestial savage.

It was one of only four examples — and the first since 2011 — of a black hole observed in the act of tearing apart a passing star in what is called a tidal disruption event and then launching luminous jets of high-energy particles in opposite directions into space, researchers said.

The culprit appears to be a supermassive black hole believed to be hundreds of millions of times the mass of our sun located roughly 8.5 billion light years away from Earth.

"When a star dangerously approaches a black hole — no worries, this will not happen to the sun — it is violently ripped apart by the black hole's gravitational tidal forces — similar to how the moon pulls tides on Earth but with greater strength," said University of Minnesota astronomer and study co-author Michael Coughlin.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology astronomer Dheeraj Pasham, lead author of the other study, said the researchers were able to observe the event very early on — within a week of the black hole starting to consume the doomed star.