Black hole rips apart doomed star in 'rare' event

WASHINGTON (REUTERS) - Scientists have captured a view of a colossal black hole violently ripping apart a doomed star, illustrating an extraordinary and chaotic cosmic event from beginning to end for the first time using Nasa's planet-hunting telescope.

Nasa's satellite known as Tess revealed the detailed timeline of the doomed star that was 375 million light-years away.

Such phenomena happen when a star, which is roughly the same size as our sun, ventures too close to a black hole.

The black hole's tremendous gravitational forces tear the star to shreds, forming a disk of hot, bright gas as it is swallowed.

Nasa scientist Knicole Colon said the cosmic occurrence, which astronomers call a tidal disruption event, is rare.

"It's definitely an exciting time for people who study black holes/ especially because, in this case too, this tidal disruption event, when a black hole shreds apart a star, that only happens every ten thousand to 100 thousand years or so it is relatively rare so any opportunity we have to study them we are using all our facilities, everything we can throw at it," she said.

Nasa said astronomers used an international network of telescopes to detect the phenomenon before turning to Tess.

She continued, "and this is just one great example of a collaboration where lots of observatories are coming together to understand this, because that is exactly what is happening with the gravitational wave events that have recently been detected, so there are a lot of observatories that are basically on call to respond to events like this and observe them at every wavelength possible."

Observing the rare event could help astronomers understand the black hole's behavior, a scientific mystery since Albert Einstein's work more than a century ago examining gravity's influence on light in motion.