Star Swallowing Black Holes

Via radio signals, scientists have detected a black hole swallowing a star similar to our sun.  A team of astrophysicists, led by a Johns Hopkins University scientist, were able to witness destruction, which led to the ejection of a flare of matter that moved close to the speed of light.
Sjoert van Velzen, a Hubble fellow at Johns Hopkins, stated:

These events are extremely rare...It's the first time we see everything from the stellar destruction followed by the launch of a conical outflow, also called a jet, and we watched it unfold over several months.

We have seen this before. Years back NASA's Swift satellite discovered evidence of a neutron star being swallowed by a black hole back in 2005.  It is not the same thing as watching a sun like our own being pulled apart, but it similarly demonstrates the danger of a star's proximity to the sun.

And below is an image from a few years ago showing a flare from a star being destroyed at a galaxy's center by a black hole.  As the NASA site noted:

These images, taken with NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the Pan-STARRS1 telescope in Hawaii, show a brightening inside a galaxy caused by a flare from its nucleus. The arrow in each image points to the galaxy. The flare is a signature of the galaxy's central black hole shredding a star that wandered too close.

Yes, the universe can be a violent place.

Great Image: Massive Black Hole

The above image is an artist's impression of a huge black hole five times larger than the black hole at the center of the Milky Way sitting in the middle of a galaxy only a fraction of the size of our galaxy.  Talk about a night sky! 

Here is NASA's story: 

Astronomers using data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and ground observation have found an unlikely object in an improbable place -- a monster black hole lurking inside one of the tiniest galaxies ever known.

The black hole is five times the mass of the one at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. It is inside one of the densest galaxies known to date -- the M60-UCD1 dwarf galaxy that crams 140 million stars within a diameter of about 300 light-years, which is only 1/500th of our galaxy’s diameter.

If you lived inside this dwarf galaxy, the night sky would dazzle with at least 1 million stars visible to the naked eye. Our nighttime sky as seen from Earth’s surface shows 4,000 stars.

The finding implies there are many other compact galaxies in the universe that contain supermassive black holes. The observation also suggests dwarf galaxies may actually be the stripped remnants of larger galaxies that were torn apart during collisions with other galaxies rather than small islands of stars born in isolation.

“We don’t know of any other way you could make a black hole so big in an object this small,” said University of Utah astronomer Anil Seth, lead author of an international study of the dwarf galaxy published in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

One explanation is that M60-UCD1 was once a large galaxy containing 10 billion stars, but then it passed very close to the center of an even larger galaxy, M60, and in that process all the stars and dark matter in the outer part of the galaxy were torn away and became part of M60.

The team believes that M60-UCD1 may eventually be pulled to fully merge with M60, which has its own monster black hole that weighs a whopping 4.5 billion solar masses, or more than 1,000 times bigger than the black hole in our galaxy. When that happens, the black holes in both galaxies also likely will merge. Both galaxies are 50 million light-years away.

Image Credit:  NASA, ESA, STScI-PRC14-41a\

Great Images: Death of a Star

This computer-generated image from NASA shows the death of a red giant as it is consumed by a black hole (PS1-10jh) located 2 billion light-years from Earth.  The destruction was captured in 2010 by NASA's orbiting Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) and the ground-based Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii.

More on GALEX:  GALEX is an orbiting space telescope observing galaxies in ultraviolet light across 10 billion years of cosmic history. Launched into orbit on April 28th, 2003 and originally planned as a 29-month mission, its mission lifetime was extended. 

GALEX’s observations are telling scientists how galaxies, the basic structures of our Universe, evolve and change. Additionally, GALEX observations are investigating the causes of star formation during a period when most of the stars and elements we see today had their origins.

Led by the California Institute of Technology, GALEX is conducting several first-of-a-kind sky surveys, including an extra-galactic (beyond our galaxy) ultraviolet all-sky survey. During its mission GALEX will produce the first comprehensive map of a Universe of galaxies under construction, bringing us closer to understanding how galaxies like our own Milky Way were formed.

More on Pan-STARRS:  The Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System is a wide-field imaging facility developed at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy. The combination of relatively small mirrors with very large digital cameras results in an economical observing system that can observe the entire available sky several times each month. The prototype single-mirror telescope PS1 is now operational on Mount Haleakala; its scientific research program is being undertaken by the PS1 Science Consortium - a collaboration between ten research organizations in four countries,

A major goal of Pan-STARRS is to discover and characterize Earth-approaching objects, both asteroids and comets, that might pose a danger to our planet.  Its vast database is also ideal for research in several other astronomical areas, particularly those which involve an aspect of time variability.