Incredible animation shows the moment extremely rare black hole rips apart star in explosion
NASA helped create a stunning animation of the moment a star was torn to shreds by a black hole and destroyed in a great explosion of light.
Out in space, there are things called intermediate-mass black holes, which are between 100 and 10,000 times larger than our own sun and capable of devouring the stars themselves.
Experts believe these kinds of black holes are a missing link between the stellar-mass black holes which are formed from collapsing stars and the truly gargantuan supermassive black holes which sit at the centre of a galaxy.
With our telescopes and monitoring instruments pointed out into space, a team of researchers think they've found one, and even more than that, they reckoned they spotted the moment it ate an actual star.
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They explained that they used the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory to spot this intermediate-mass black hole dubbed HLX-1 at work.
As you can see in the animation the space telescopes looked at a pair of galaxies very far away where they spotted a cluster of stars gathered around the black hole on the outskirts of one of those galaxies which they called NGC 6099.
This is all happening around 450 million light years away from us, so these events transpired long before even the dinosaurs existed.
In the animation simulating the events the scientists believe they observed a 'tidal disruption event' which occurs when a star gets too close to a black hole and is torn apart by the unbelievably strong cosmic forces which power black holes.
In essence the star is pulled in and 'spaghettified', which is where a black hole compresses an object into something very long and thin.
Even something as powerful as a star isn't safe from spaghettification, and the animation shows the star being sucked into the black hole and looping the stellar material around the mighty phenomenon.
There's then a big flash of radiation generated by the destruction of the star, as one of the near-infinite denizens of the cosmos is devoured and destroyed.
These events happened hundreds of millions of years ago but we've been fortunate enough to be able to observe them and then produce a simulation giving us an even clearer idea of how a star died long before there was ever such a thing as a human.
Of course, the researchers have noted that there's a chance HLX-1 isn't real and what they saw was actually something else.
NASA experts are on the lookout for more intermediate-mass black holes as they are particularly rare.
Space telescopes do much of the work of spotting potential sites where they might be, and when you find a black hole there's always a chance you'll catch it gobbling up a star.
Joe Harker