PHOTO: Black Hole EATING A Star Is Cosmo Destruction Bliss

Bask in the destructive beauty of the cosmos. We go about our daily lives not really contemplating the sheer magnitude of the fury that the Universe can unleash. Right here is a black hole devouring the shit out of a star.

Gizmodo:

Look at this star turned into a fire dragon by a single point of nothingness with the mass of three million suns–its body twisted and deformed as a black beast 2.7 billion light-years away devours it with infinite hunger.

The  synthetic  image has been published in Nature along with photos directly taken by NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the Pan-STARRS1 telescope in Mount Haleakala in Hawaii. It was created from data collected in real time since 2009. The astronomers have been closely observing this event since the very beginning, which is quite exceptional: this is a rarely observed phenomenon that  has only been detected once  before.

In fact, according to the paper coauthor Ryan Chornock–of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics–”black holes, like sharks, suffer from a popular misconception that they are perpetual killing machines. Actually, they’re quiet for most of their lives. Occasionally a star wanders too close, and that’s when a feeding frenzy begins.”

Which is exactly what the images and the data show. Apparently, says Chornock, “this star barely survived one encounter with the black hole, only to meet its unfortunate end in round two.” As it sucked the star in, the supermassive blackhole–comparable in mass to  the one in the center of our galaxy–also ejected gas at high speeds into space.

Existential righteousness.