Supermassive black hole captured 'eating' a star while producing a jet with 125 BILLION times more energy than the sun in world first

• Experts discovered the event in a pair of colliding galaxies called Arp 299
• It was first observed in 2005 when experts found a bright burst of infrared 
• Now they have captured a fast-moving jet of material being ejected from it
• Only a small number of such stellar deaths have ever been detected, experts say

An enormous black hole has been captured 'eating' a star 150 million light years away.

Experts have taken images of a fast-moving jet of material being ejected from the cosmic monster, which is 20 million times more massive than the sun.

They claim the superfast jet of particles packed about 125 billion times the amount of energy the sun releases per year.

Only a small number of such stellar deaths, called tidal disruption events (TDEs), have ever been detected.

However, scientists believe that they may have been a more common occurrence in the early days of the universe.

Studying them may help researchers better understand the environment in which galaxies developed billions of years ago.

Experts say the superfast jet of particles packed about 125 billion times the amount of energy the sun releases per year. Pictured is an artist's impression

An enormous black hole has been captured 'eating' a star 150 million light years away. Experts have taken images of a fast-moving jet of material being ejected from the cosmic monster (pictured), which is 20 million times more massive than the sun 

An international team of scientists, including from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at the University of Virginia, tracked the event with radio and infrared telescopes in a pair of colliding galaxies called Arp 299.

At the core of one of the galaxies, a supermassive black hole shredded a star more than twice the Sun's mass, setting off a chain of events that revealed important details of the violent encounter.

Experts say that material pulled from the doomed star forms a rotating disk around the black hole, emitting intense X-rays and visible light, as well as launching jets of material outward from the poles of the disk at nearly the speed of light.

'Never before have we been able to directly observe the formation and evolution of a jet from one of these events,' said Miguel Perez-Torres, of the Astrophysical Institute of Andalusia in Granada, Spain, who was involved in the research.

WHAT ARE BLACK HOLES?

Black holes are so dense and their gravitational pull is so strong that no form of radiation can escape them - not even light.

They act as intense sources of gravity which hoover up dust and gas around them.

Their intense gravitational pull is thought to be what stars in galaxies orbit around.

How they are formed is still poorly understood.

Supermassive black holes are incredibly dense areas in the centre of galaxies with masses that can be billions of times that of the sun. They cause dips in space-time (artist's impression) and even light cannot escape their gravitational pull

Astronomers believe they may form when a large cloud of gas up to 100,000 times bigger than the sun, collapses into a black hole.

Many of these black hole seeds then merge to form much larger supermassive black holes, which are found at the centre of every known massive galaxy.

Alternatively, a supermassive black hole seed could come from a giant star, about 100 times the sun's mass, that ultimately forms into a black hole after it runs out of fuel and collapses.

When these giant stars die, they also go 'supernova', a huge explosion that expels the matter from the outer layers of the star into deep space. 

The first indication of the presence of the black hole came on January 30, 2005, when astronomers using the William Herschel Telescope in the Canary Islands discovered a bright burst of infrared emission coming from the nucleus of one of the colliding galaxies in Arp 299. 

On July 17, 2005, the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) revealed a new, distinct source of radio emission from the same location.

Continued observations with the VLBA, the European VLBI Network (EVN), and other radio telescopes, carried out over nearly a decade, showed the source of radio emission expanding in one direction, just as expected for a jet. 

The measured expansion indicated that the material in the jet moved at an average of one-fourth the speed of light. 

Fortunately, the radio waves are not absorbed in the core of the galaxy, but find their way through it to reach the Earth.

These observations used multiple radio-telescope antennas, separated by thousands of miles (km), to gain the resolving power, or ability to see fine detail, required to detect the expansion of an object so distant. 

The patient, years-long data collection rewarded the scientists with the evidence of a jet.

An international team of scientists tracked the event in a pair of colliding galaxies called Arp 299, depicted in a Hubble telescope image in the background of this composite picture

Most galaxies have supermassive black holes, containing millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, at their cores.

In a black hole, the mass is so concentrated that its gravitational pull is so strong that not even light can escape. 

When those supermassive black holes are actively drawing in material from their surroundings, that material forms a rotating disk around the black hole, and superfast jets of particles are launched outward. 

This is the phenomenon seen in radio galaxies and quasars.

'Much of the time, however, supermassive black holes are not actively devouring anything, so they are in a quiet state,' Dr Perez-Torres added.

'Tidal disruption events can provide us with a unique opportunity to advance our understanding of the formation and evolution of jets in the vicinities of these powerful objects.' 

The initial infrared burst was discovered as part of a project that sought to detect supernova explosions in such colliding pairs of galaxies. 

Arp 299 has seen numerous stellar explosions, and has been dubbed a 'supernova factory.' 

This new object originally was considered to be a supernova explosion. 

Only in 2011, six years after discovery, the radio-emitting portion began to show an elongation. Subsequent monitoring showed the expansion growing, confirming that what the scientists are seeing is a jet, not a supernova.

Mattila and Perez-Torres led a team of 36 scientists from 26 institutions around the world in the observations of Arp 299. 

They published their full findings in the journal Science.

Experts tracked the event with radio and infrared telescopes, including , the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (pictured)