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Black holes, cosmic phenomena famed for their appetites, often devour stars that get too close to them in one large mouthful, annihilating them with their immense gravitational force. However, some people like to munch rather than overeat.
According to the researchers, they have observed a supermassive black hole at the center of a relatively nearby galaxy as it consumes material equal to about three times Earth's mass each time the star makes a close pass on its elongated oval-shaped obit.
Black holes are very dense objects with such much gravity that not even light can escape.
The star is approximately 520 million light years away from our solar system. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, which is 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). A supermassive black hole at the center of a spiral-shaped galaxy was witnessed devouring it.
As far as black holes go, this one is rather modest, with a mass a few hundred thousand times that of the sun. Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy, has approximately 4 million times the mass of our sun. Other galaxies have supermassive black holes that are hundreds of millions of times the mass of the sun.
Most galaxies have such black holes at their cores, and their surroundings can be among the most violent in the cosmos.
The majority of the data utilized in the current research comes from NASA's orbiting Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory.
Every 20 to 30 days, scientists studied the star around the black hole. At one end of its orbit, it gets close enough to the black hole to have some of its stellar atmosphere sucked away, or accreted, each time it passes — but not close enough to have the entire star shredded. This is known as a "repeating partial tidal disruption."
The star material that falls into the black hole warms up to around 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit (2 million degrees Celsius), releasing massive amounts of X-rays. The space observatory picked up on them.
"What's most likely to happen is that the star's orbit will gradually decay and it will get closer and closer to the supermassive black hole until it gets close enough to be completely disrupted," said astrophysicist Rob Eyles-Ferris of the University of Leicester in England, one of the study's authors.
"That process is likely to take at least years — more likely decades or centuries," Eyles-Ferris noted.
This was the first time astronomers saw a sun-like star being devoured by a supermassive black hole on a regular basis.
"There are many unanswered questions about tidal disruption events and how the star's orbit affects them," Eyles-Ferris stated. "It's a very fast-moving field right now." This one has demonstrated that fresh discoveries can occur at any time."