For the 1st time, astronomers see eruption from black hole as it rips star apart

It's probably one the most massive belches you'll ever see.

For the first time, astronomers have directly imaged material being ejected from asupermassiveblack hole after it ripped apart an unlucky star.

The centre of most galaxies are believed to containasupermassiveblack hole, which can be millions of times more massive than our sun.A starthat wanders too close to a black hole will be ripped apart by itsgravitational pull, its material falling into theblack holewhere nothing can escape, not even light.

But as the material is torn apart,it first forms a disk around the black hole.

Only a handful of these tidal disruption events (TDE)have ever been detected.

But now astronomers using radio and infrared telescopes, which see in wavelengths invisible to the human eye have observed a TDEin action, where some of the material is ejected out into space from the poles of the disk.

TheTDEis occurring around asupermassiveblack hole in a pair of colliding galaxies calledArp299, nearly 150 million light-years away. The emission wasfirst discovered in 2005.

Though it was believed that the emission should also show up in optical telescopes, nothing wasobserved in either visible or X-ray emissions.

"As time passed, the new object stayed bright at infrared and radio wavelengths, but not in visible light and X-rays,"SeppoMattila, of the University ofTurkuin Finland, said in a statement. "The most likely explanation is that thick interstellar gas and dust near the galaxy's centre absorbed the X-rays and visible light, then re-radiated it as infrared."

Astronomers continued monitoring the eventusing the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA)telescope in Hawaii and saw it expanding over the years, just as theorized.

Initially, the researchers believed the brightening was a supernovaa violent stellar death that ends in an explosion. Six years later, the researchers realized that the emission was becoming elongated, which ruled out a supernova.

The team hopes that this new finding will help them reveal more of these TDEsand lead to a better understanding of galaxy formation.