They are notorious for breaking the usual laws of physics in the universe and bending or even distorting space and time.
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The black hole is only 300 million light years away from us and the team (led by Dr Sjoert van Velzen from The Johns Hopkins University in the USA) were able to make their first observations only three weeks after it was found.
Prior theories are suggesting how a black hole is a region of spacetime that is so dense that its gravitational forces can devour anything from light to radiation.
The researchrs ruled out the possibility that the light being beamed out was from something called an “accretion disk”, which forms when a black hole is sucking up matter from space, and that then supported the hypothesis that the jet was indeed from a sucked up star.
Black holes are formed when stars of a particular size reach the end of their life having burned all their nuclear fuel in a fusion reaction. The team also saw a beam of high-speed flare escaping the rim of the black hole.
Black holes eat anything and everything in proximity, and astronomers recently got a front row seat to one chomping down on a massive star.
Scientists have discovered a hungry black hole swallowing a star at the centre of a nearby galaxy. “These events are extremely rare”.
Scientists have seen black holes swallowing stars before and they’ve also separately detected these mysterious jets of matter blasting out, but until now no one had been fast enough with their telescopes to link the two events, and were never able to witness them occurring in sequence.
“Previous efforts to find evidence for these jets, including my own, were late to the game”, said van Velzen, who led the analysis and coordinated the efforts of 13 other scientists in the United States, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Australia.
The discovery of the jet was made possible by a rapid observational response after the stellar disruption (known as ASAS-SN-14li) was announced in December 2014. They were just in time to catch the action, and the team was able to witness the event from a range of satellites and telescopes, creating a picture of the event in X-ray, radio, and optical signals. That helped to confirm that the sudden increase of light from the galaxy was due to a newly trapped star.
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“These jets are a unique tool for probing supermassive black holes”, said co-author Dr Morgan Fraser of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy. Soon after, the data was interpreted and the study revealing the process was published in the Science journal.
