By: Jason Li
Recently, a star had a supermassive black hole traveling in its path and was traveling too close to a black hole, the unlucky star ended up getting ripped apart by the black hole’s gravitational pull. A black hole is a place in space that uses its gravity to pull everything into it, even light. The gravity is so strong because there is a lot of mass compressed into a very small area.
It might not have been too good for the star, but scientists did learn a lot from it. Jeff Cooke, an Australian scientist, says, “We could see a star travel too close to a supermassive black hole. A black hole millions of times more massive than our sun which wasn’t very good for the star but was very cool for us, as it provided crucial information.” Pieces of the doomed star were swept up into a spinning disk of debris, before it was entirely consumed. “We haven't seen something even remotely similar in a decade, and even that wasn’t as bright.” The black hole that tore the star apart was about 100 million times larger than the sun. The star that got ripped apart was around the same size as the sun.