NASA captures never-seen before image of echoes of black holes eating stars!

Image credit: NASA

New Delhi: The super massive black holes have turned into a rapacious beast. With their tremendous gravitational pull, they are sucking everything that gets too close to them, including stars.

For the first time ever NASA scientists have documented the whole process of radiation expulsion from black holes. All thanks to NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) that provided deep insights into the tidal disruption flares.

According to SpaceRef a black hole destroying a star, an event astronomers call "stellar tidal disruption," releases an enormous amount of energy, brightening the surroundings in an event called a flare. In recent years, a few dozen such flares have been discovered, but they are not well understood.

Two new studies characterize tidal disruption flares by studying how surrounding dust absorbs and re-emits their light, like echoes.

This approach allowed scientists to measure the energy of flares from stellar tidal disruption events more precisely than ever before.