Mary Bowerman

USA TODAY Network

A massive black hole devoured a star over a 10 year period, setting a new record for the longest space meal ever observed, according to new research.

Researchers spotted the ravenous black hole with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Swift satellite as well as ESA’s XMM-Newton, according to a statement from NASA.

When objects like stars get too close to black holes, the intense gravity of the black hole can rip the star apart in what’s called a tidal disruption event (TDE), according to NASA.

While some of the debris from the star is flung forward, parts of it are pulled back and ingested by the black hole, where it heats up and emits an X-ray flare, NASA said in a statement.

The tidal disruption event spotted by the trio of X-ray telescopes, is unlike anything researchers have ever seen, lasting ten times longer than any observed incident of star’s death caused by a black hole, according to research published in Nature Astronomy Feb. 6.

“We have witnessed a star’s spectacular and prolonged demise,” Dacheng Lin from the University of New Hampshire in Durham, N.H., who led the study, said in a statement. “Dozens of tidal disruption events have been detected since the 1990s, but none that remained bright for nearly as long as this one.”

The black hole, dubbed XJ1500+0154, is located in a galaxy 1.8 billion light-years from Earth. Researchers first spotted it in 2005 and it reached peak brightness in 2008, according to the statement. According to NASA, researchers believe that the black hole may have consumed the most massive star ever completely torn apart during a TDE.

“For most of the time we’ve been looking at this object, it has been growing rapidly,” James Guillochon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. and co-author of the study said in a statement. “This tells us something unusual — like a star twice as heavy as our Sun — is being fed into the black hole.”

Observing the prolonged death of this star, shows that supermassive black holes can grow quickly and may allow researchers to better understand black holes beginnings, according to the statement.

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