Three Stars Were Utterly Destroyed by Supermassive Black Holes
Scientists have found out that black holes may be more ravenous than expected. They’ve registered three possible occasions of the total destruction of stars by supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies.
A star in a galaxy passes by a black hole closely enough to be destroyed about once every 10,000 years. It’s possible to detect the death of a star in distant galaxies through the bright X-ray flare that the star creates as it dies.
In this case, the scientists first discovered these instances of star destruction by using data from the X-ray orbiting observatories ROSAT and XXM-Newton. They had to distinguish the destruction of the star by a black hole from other occurrences, though. They did this by filtering out extraneous signals from consideration flares in our own galaxy.
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