Abell 1795

 Black hole destroying a star .

• A bright,long duration flare may be the first recorded event of a black hole destroying a star in a dwarf galaxy. The evidence comes from combing through several years of Chandra data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes.
• The so-called dwarf galaxy is located in the galaxy cluster Abell 1795, about 800 million light years from Earth. It contains about 700 million stars, far less than a typical galaxy like the Milky Way, which has between 200 and 400 billion stars.
• As part of an ongoing search of Chandra’s archival data for events signaling the disruption of stars by massive black holes, astronomers found a prime candidate. Beginning in 1999, an unusually bright X-ray source had appeared in a dwarf galaxy and then faded until it was no longer detected after 2005.
• Scientists predict that a star that wanders too close to a giant, or supermassive, black hole could be ripped apart by extreme tidal forces. As the stellar debris falls toward the black hole, it would produce intense X-radiation as it is heated to millions of degrees. The X-rays would diminish in a characteristic manner as the hot gas spiraled inward.
• Astronomers believe that intermediate mass black holes may be the “seeds” that ultimately formed the supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies like the Milky Way. Finding additional nearby examples should teach us about how these primordial galaxies from the early universe grew and evolved over cosmic time.