Tek-Bull

Black Hole Engulfs a Star

Black Hole is where all signs of matter, practically stand still, not even light can escape it’s wrath. And just recently, one of them engulfed an entire star and gave us one of the longest light flashes ever recorded after the death of a star.

It is still a mystery as to what exactly happened, but many researches believe that the star wandered to close to the black hole and it got sucked in by the powerful gravitational forces. NASA’s ‘swift’ Spacecraft was able to catch a glimpse of the “flash” of the star’s final moments which was the equivalent of a Billion Suns.  The destruction of the star was so tremendous that two months after it’s destruction NASA Telescopes are still seeing the radiation flashes here on earth.

I didn’t know that stars wondered around space without an actual path, scientist believe that the black hole was the one that stumbled upon the star and not the other way around. But scientist are now more confused than ever due to this event.

At first, Scientist confused the explosion with an ordinary Gama burst, explosions that happen every other day when a star blows up or two of them collide, and it wasn’t until they kept on receiving the “flash of light” two months after it’s destruction.

The reason that the light continues to be seen months after the star’s initial destruction is because the black hole destroys and rips the star apart little by little, the star’s mass and energy swirls around from the edges of the black hole and into the center of the hole, similar to a water drain, during this time the energy of the star is being released in jet stream.

We were lucky to have seen this great spectacle of light, Gama Rays are like laser beams, they are directed towards one direction, so we were very lucky to have seen this, the jet just happened to be pointed at the earth when the star was destroyed.  Otherwise we would have never seen this spectacle.

It is amazing at how little we know about our universe…

Via: Daily Mail, BBC