NASA Photographed ‘One Meal’ of a Black Hole

NASA, the national space agency of the USA, has managed to capture an event that rarely falls into the lenses of our surveillance tools in space. We know that black holes draw near objects. Well, have you ever witnessed the moment when a black hole engulfs an object?

Videos of this event have been shared in the past years. Now, NASA has managed to capture the moment of a new ‘black hole engulfing an object’. Let’s take a look at the situation together.

A black hole 250 million light years away swallowed a star

Recently, several NASA telescopes have managed to observe the moment when a black hole swallows an ‘unlucky’ star orbiting very close to it. Why does it matter if this black hole, located at the center of another galaxy, about 250 million light-years from Earth, swallows a star?

Because this recorded star’s moment of engulfment is the closest this event has ever been observed. In addition, previous investigations were not fully visible due to the particles released due to the event.

After the star was thoroughly torn apart by the black hole’s gravity, astronomers saw a dramatic increase in high-energy X-rays around the black hole. This indicates that as the stellar material was pulled towards the black hole, it formed an extremely hot structure called ‘Corona’ on the black hole.

An animation that simulates the event:

What we call Corona is not the virus we know. Astronomers call a cloud of hot plasma, or gas atoms that have been stripped of their electrons, Corona.