Feb 18 2004
From The Space Library
NASA and ESA jointly announced that scientists had obtained evidence of a black hole consuming a star, an event known as stellar tidal disruption. Previously, scientists had only theorized the existence of such an event. Using observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton orbiting observatory, an international team of scientists had discovered a star that had been thrown from its orbit after a close encounter with another star and, subsequently, had moved into the gravitational field of a black hole. The black hole, with a mass estimated at 100 million times greater than the Sun, had exerted a gravitational pull on the star that led to its eventual disintegration. Stefanie Komossa of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany led the group of scientists that had made the discovery. (John Noble Wilford, “Black Holes' Vast Power Is Documented,” New York Times, 19 February 2004; Stefanie Komossa, Jules P. Halpern, and Suvi Gezari, “Follow-up Chandra Observations of Three Candidate Tidal Disruption Events,” Astrophysical Journal 604, no. 2 (1 April 2004): 572-578.
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