A long time ago in a dwarf galaxy far, far away, a drama of cosmic dimensions unfolded. A star gets too close to a lurking black hole and is sucked in by the extreme gravity.
The star does not escape. In a spiraling motion, it is drawn closer and closer until it finally tears apart.
The black hole swallows a large part of the star and hurls the rest away in a giant arc of red-hot matter, which outshines all other light from the dwarf galaxy’s stars.
Eight hundred and fifty million years later, in June 2020, a group of astronomers on Earth accidentally point their telescopes at the dwarf galaxy. They are looking for supernovae, that is, exploding stars, but suddenly they see the sharp glow of the star’s death struggle.
Now, after two years of in-depth analysis, the researchers know what was behind the glow.
It was a star that was swallowed by a black hole. More importantly, however, the black hole is of a type that scientists very rarely see.
2023-08-13 23:08:24
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