A black hole is observed by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope twisting a star into a “donut.”
Astronomers have watched as a black hole tears a star into a “ donut ” and then eats it. The process is one of the most violent and extreme in the universe: when a star gets too close to a black hole, it tears it up, eating the star but also spewing radiation out. It is known as a “tidal disruption event”. Scientists have watched as that happens, using the Hubble Space Telescope to record the final moments of the star as it was eaten up. Researchers hope to use the observations and other like it to better understand what happens when a star falls into the abyss and is torn apart in such a way. Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope is unable to see the process as it happens, since the new example is almost 300 million light years away. But they can see the light that is thrown out when it does happen, and examine that light for the clues to what happens to the star. Researchers have seen many such examples of tidal disruption events around black holes. About 100 of them have been do...