A team including a University of Sydney researcher observed a star being torn apart after getting to close to a massive black hole, the university said Monday.
The event is incredibly rare, occurring once every 10,000 years in any galaxy, a university release said Monday.
Researcher Sean Farrell said the observation was made in 2006 by the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray Telescope and was discovered as astronomers pored over archival data. The bright flare recorded, they realized, was the signature of a star being ripped apart in a galaxy 500 million light years away.
In 2007, the flare had increased in brightness, then a February 2011 observation of the area by NASA's SWIFT X-ray Telescope found the flare had dimmed significantly.
"We were very lucky that the telescope happened to have this event in its field of view," Farrell said of the original 2006 observations. "Of course when we realized that the star had been obliterated because it had gone too close to a super massive black hole we knew what we had observed was something even more extraordinary."
Super massive black holes, or SMBH, are known to exist at the centers of galaxies, but little is known about them.
"So to have witnessed such a rare event provides us with an incredible opportunity to study what happens to stars when they get too close to the edge of a SMBH," Farrell said.
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