'Spaghetti' star enveloped around a black hole marked for the first time.

Filaments of material wrapped around a supermassive black hole have been spotted for the first time suggesting a star trapped by the black hole's gravity has just been destroyed by ”spaghettification”.

Astronomers believe that the effect more commonly known as tidal disruption takes place because the black hole's gravity pulls more strongly on the side of the star closer to the black hole. The black hole first separates the star, then draws its material, converting the star into a long filament.

Previously, the only evidence of such a situation where a star met a violent demise venturing too close to a galaxy's center, came in the form of short bursts of electromagnetic radiation that astronomers occasionally observed emanating from supermassive black holes.

However, it is not so far that scientists have seen evidence of the actual physical filament of a star near the black hole. In this new study, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on March 24, a team of astronomers from the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON) and Radboud University in the Netherlands has successfully detected such a spaghettified star in spectral absorption lines around the poles of a distant black hole.

Absorption lines are abnormally dark lines detected in the otherwise continuous spectrum of electromagnetic radiation emitted by a source, in this instance a black hole. These lines appear when the material which absorbs some of the electromagnetic radiation (in this case the spaghetti star) obscures the source.

The astronomers observed spectral absorption lines by looking at the rotary pole of the black hole. The observation suggested that there was a strand of material wrapped several times around the black hole like a ball of thread, the scientists said in a statement on April 23rd. The team believes that this material is the torn star as it orbits around the black hole before disappearing inside.

Certified material discs exist around black hole equators. Made of material that is drawn to but not yet swallowed up by the black hole, the disk orbits around the equator at a very high speed, emitting heat, X-rays, and gamma-rays in the process.

The authors of the present study, however, state that the material they were looking at was not part of the accretion disc.

"The lines of absorption are narrow," says Giacomo Cannizzaro, the lead writer of the article. "They're not broadened by the Doppler effect, as you would expect when you look at a rotating disk."

The Doppler effect, caused by the fast motion of the material in the accretion disk, stretches or shrinks the electromagnetic waves depending on whether the source is moving towards or away from the observer. Consequently, the light emitted by the part of the accretion disk that moves away from the Earth would be clearer. But scientists have seen no proof of this.

The researchers also stated in the declaration that they knew they were facing the black hole pole because they could detect X-rays. 'The accretion disc is the only part of a black hole system that emits that kind of radiation,' the statement said. "If we looked from top to bottom, we would not see the x-rays of the accretion disc."

Millions or even billions of times heavier than the sun, we think that supermassive black holes line the center of most galaxies. They grow over billions of years, swallowing whatever falls into their gravitational grasp. Astronomers can detect black holes with the brilliant X-rays they emit as they gobble up gas and matter from their surroundings.

Stars that orbit the central parts of galaxies can sometimes roam so near black holes that they are trapped by their gravity. They move closer and closer to the black hole and end up dying prematurely with spaghettification.

Original Publlication on Space.com