By GARRET ROBINSON
Staff Writer
Recently, astronomers were able to capture the event of a star being ripped into long strips and devoured by a black hole. This event caught the attention of scientists across the globe when the bright blast of light was discovered near a known supermassive black hole. Edo Berger, an astronomer from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, states, “In this case the star was torn apart with about half of its mass feeding — or accreting — into a black hole of one million times the mass of the sun, and the other half was ejected outward”. The part that gets consumed by the black hole experiences a process of spaghettification where the light is stretched into thin, long strips that resemble spaghetti while the part that is ejected outwards is partly dust which will cover up this event later on. This phenomenon is very rare to catch because either there is too much dust which covers it up or the light from the event hasn’t had time to reach us yet. Only time will tell if we can view more of these rare occurrences.
