Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA detected a black hole eating a black hole star. The research findings have been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. This moment, which marks a very rare event, marks the first time a black hole has swallowed a star this close.

The glow detected in the galaxy NGC 7392 in 2015 (upper left), Observations from the same galaxy in 2010-2011 (upper right), lower left revealing the detected TDE event by revealing the difference between the first two images. The image in the lower right is the image of the galaxy.

Every 10,000 years, the center of a galaxy lights up when a supermassive black hole shatters a nearby star. In this astronomical phenomenon, called the "tidal disruption event," or TDE for short, the black hole shoots out large amounts of radiation as it pulls in stellar material, resulting in large flashes.

This event, detected by MIT researchers, shows a TDE much closer than anything we've seen so far. The event, called WTP14adbjsh, takes place in the galaxy NGC 7392, 137 million light-years away, and allows us to see the eerie glow produced when a black hole swallows a star.

It also represents a first by being caught in an unusual light. WTP14adbjsh was observed as a rather bright infrared flare rather than optical or X-ray. This suggests that there may be tidal disruption events that we missed because we weren't looking in the right place.

"Finding this close TDE statistically suggests that there may be a large number of such events that conventional methods have not seen," said MIT astrophysicist Christos Panagiotou.