The satelliteвЂ™s massive surveying area covers an area of space 400 times larger than that observed by the famed Kepler telescope. Apparently, NASAвЂ™s TESS satellite, which launched in July 2018, had detected the early signs of a possible TDE. However, the latest advancements in NASA technology allowed scientists to achieve just that. NASAвЂ™s Goddard Space Flight Center An artistвЂ™s rendering of a star caught in the gravity of a supermassive black hole and ripped to bits.

вЂњImagine that you are standing on top of a skyscraper downtown, and you drop a marble off the top, and you are trying to get it to go down a hole in a manhole cover,вЂќ Chris Kochanek, professor of astronomy at Ohio State, said in a press release. Some of that starry material is then shot back out into space as the rest remains trapped in the black hole.Дue to their rarity, these events are very difficult to capture. If itвЂ™s at the perfect distance, the star can be seen in part sucked in by the black holeвЂ™s dominating gravity and ultimately ripped apart. If the star is too far, itвЂ™ll simply ricochet off the black hole and be bounced off into space. If a star wanders too close to a black hole, it will be sucked in without a trace. The event, known as a tidal disruption event (TDE), is not only rare - occurring once every 10,000 to 100,000 years in a galaxy the size of the Milky Way - but it also requires very specific conditions to occur. The ill-fated star was roughly the same size as our sun. So, according to Science Alert, what weвЂ™re seeing actually happened 375 million years ago, but the light is only reaching us now. The supermassive black hole in question is estimated to weigh approximately 6 million times the mass of our sun and is located in the Volans constellation, some 375 million light-years away from Earth. The conditions have to be just right for a black hole to rip apart a star like this.

Flight sucked into a black hole