NASA scientist Brad Cenko revealed the devastating gravity intensity of black holes following the release of footage of black hole ripping apart a star. While on Sky News Mr Cenko explained that black holes have the ability to destroy and consume stars similar sized to our own. The devastating power of black holes was emphasised in never before seen footage of a black hole in a faraway galaxy consuming a star travelling too close to it.
Mr Cenko said: “Blackholes are really phenomenal objects.
“If you imagine squeezing the Earth into something just the size of a penny.
“The gravity is so strong that not even light can escape, in this case, it was actually able to tear a star apart in something we call a tidal disruption event.”
Mr Cenko was then asked on the likelihood of such an event happening in our own galaxy.
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He warned: “Well, it turns out that there is a supermassive black hole in the middle of our own galaxy.
“Our sun is located far enough away that it is not something that we need to worry about but there will be unlucky stars once every 10,000 or 100,000 years or so that will wander too close to our blackhole and may light up in the same way this happened.”
Dr David Whitehouse also reflected on the historic event on Sky News.
He said: “It is quite a dramatic event.
“It doesn’t happen very often in our galaxy perhaps once every 10,000 or 100,000 years because space is very big.
“It was then ripped apart by the tidal forces.
“It was not a question of the star circling the blackhole and slowly going down like water down a hole.
“It actually gets ripped asunder and part of it spirals to the black hole and part of it disappears into space.
“You have got a star, like our sun, roughly a million miles across ripped apart.
“This is a timescale of weeks, you can see the streams of material from this star, the centre of it, the outer layers all get squashed into a filament, a spaghetti-like thing.”