Astronomers Just Caught a Black Hole Swallowing a Star [PHOTOS]

In this day and age of advanced exploration, the number of first times is quite limited but astrophysicists from the Pennysylvania State University were lucky to have witnessed one -- and it involved a black hole swallowing a star.

Supermassive black holes reside at the center of all large galaxies. These "monsters" are said to be millions to billions times the mass of our Sun enabling them to destroy celestial beings that come too close. For years, astronomers have only witnessed aftermaths of these awesome yet terrifying space events and have correlated it to the study of "relativistic jets" -- they have never seen the onset of one.

Space.com said that evidences of these black hole destructions "come in the form of a bright flare of ultraviolet, gamma and X-rays" which may actually last for years until the star has been fully "consumed."

"Now we've seen the start of this event for the first time," said study co-author David Burrows, a Pennsylvania State University astrophysicist.

Since March 25 the Swift satellite has been documenting "a string of extremely bright bursts of gamma rays" outside the Milky Way galaxy and lasted for two days. The same report noted that astronomers have indeed observed gamma ray bursts in the past, but remarked that this pattern of light "was completely different."

Ashley Zauderer, co-author of a different study and astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said: "It was nothing like we expected for a gamma-ray burst."

In support of the unique observation were documentation from several radio telescopes which suggested that the flare came from the middle of the galaxy, adding that "the source of this radiation was expanding at 99.5 percent the speed of light." The flare reportedly came from a "relativistic jet" -- an outcome of a black hole ripping apart a star which scientists named Swift J1644+57.

Based on the wavelengths observed, the scientists affirmed that it "originated from matter falling or accreting onto a black hole about 1 million times the mass of the sun."

Gemma Anderson, an astrophysicist from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), said: "It's very unusual when a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy actually eats a star, we've probably only seen about 20 of them."

"There are a lot more surprises in space for us to discover, especially as we continue to make huge strides in the technical capabilities of our instruments," Zauderer said.

See the official photos here.