WATCH: NASA's Hubble telescope records star's final moments getting devoured by black hole

Astronomers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) used the Hubble Space Telescope to capture and record a star's final moments in detail as it is literally eaten by a black hole. "Black holes are gatherers, not hunters. They lie in wait until a hapless star wanders by. When the star gets close enough, the black hole's gravitational grasp violently rips it apart and sloppily devours its gasses while belching out intense radiation," said NASA releasing the report. 

The event, according to NASA happens in unique in its frequency. "For any given galaxy with a quiescent supermassive black hole at the center, it's estimated that the stellar shredding happens only a few times in every 100,000 years," reported NASA. This event, termed "tidal disruption events" by astronomers, was observed in ultraviolet light. The All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN or "Assassin") first detected it on March 1, 2022.

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About 100 tidal disruption events around black holes have been detected by astronomers using various telescopes. NASA recently reported that several of its high-energy space observatories spotted another black hole tidal disruption event on March 1, 2021, and it happened in another galaxy. Unlike Hubble observations, data was collected in X-ray light from an extremely hot corona around the black hole that formed after the star was already torn apart.

"However, there are still very few tidal events that are observed in ultraviolet light given the observing time. This is really unfortunate because there's a lot of information that you can get from the ultraviolet spectra," told Emily Engelthaler of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts to NASA. "We're excited because we can get these details about what the debris is doing. The tidal event can tell us a lot about a black hole." Changes in the doomed star's condition are taking place on the order of days or months.

"Typically, these events are hard to observe. You get maybe a few observations at the beginning of the disruption when it's really bright. Our program is different in that it is designed to look at a few tidal events over a year to see what happens," said Peter Maksym of the CfA. "We saw this early enough that we could observe it at these very intense black hole accretion stages. We saw the accretion rate drop as it turned to a trickle over time."