Astronomers have witnessed for the first time a star the size of our Sun being completely ripped apart and destroyed by a supermassive black hole.

The scientists watched the process unfold as the star was grabbed and ripped to pieces, forming a disk of debris around the black hole before disappearing beyond the event horizon.

Stellar remnants not swallowed up by the black hole’s feeding frenzy were shot out into space at close to the speed of light by powerful magnetic fields forming plasma jets.

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The spectacular stellar demise, reported in the journal Science, provided scientists with an opportunity to observe a black hole feeding in unprecedented detail.

“We’ve seen material [from giant gas clouds] falling into black hole disks producing jets before, but this is a process that can take millions of years,” Dr Gemma Anderson of Curtin University said.

“What we’ve now witnessed is a much faster event where a star gets eaten and accreted very quickly onto a supermassive black hole over just weeks.

“This is happening so quickly that we can observe the evolution of this process on human time scales.”

She said the discovery confirmed that scientists’ understanding of how black holes feed was correct.

The supermassive black hole named All Sky Automated Survey for Supernova 14Li – or more appropriately ASASSN-14Li – is about 300 million light-years away and is at least a million times more massive than the Sun.

The black hole’s feeding frenzy was first discovered by a separate team of astronomers last year.

Follow-up observations using X-ray, optical and radio telescopes provided a stunning multi-wavelength portrait of the unfolding drama.

“It’s the first time a tidal disruption event – which is a star being destroyed by a supermassive black hole – has been found through optical telescope surveys and we’ve been able to see these jets with a radio telescope,” Dr Anderson said.

“We turned our radio telescope towards this event within 20 days of its discovery and saw these radio jets flowing out.

“We think these jets haven’t been seen before because they’re either too far away for our telescopes to see, or we just didn’t observe them soon enough. A lot of them weren’t observed at radio wavelengths until three years after the event.”

The new observations show astronomers that streams of stellar debris on the disk surrounding the black hole can form into jets very quickly.

“The jets being observed coming from this event are producing more energy than the Sun produces in 10 million years,” Dr Anderson said.

This indicated that supermassive black holes and stellar black holes feed the same way, she said.

Watch the artist’s impression of the video here:

– ABC