Supermassive black holes are found in the center of most galaxies, their mass is hundreds of thousands of times that of our Sun, it is difficult for even light to escape from them. They are invisible, they cannot be seen, but when a star gets close to a black hole, the star is pulled apart by strong tidal forces, creating a disk of stellar debris that the black hole feeds on, due to which the existence of black hole is known.
Two teams of astronomers, using ESA’s XMM-Newton space telescope, have deduced that there are repeated bursts of light from black holes, which partially destroy stars, but light bursts on black holes Viewed only once. When a star gets too close to a black hole, and explodes into a stream of gas, it is a typical tidal disruption event, in which the tidal disruption event displays a bright burst of light.
The repeated flashes of X-ray and UV light after the first encounter between the star and the black hole suggest to researchers that the star was not completely destroyed during the initial encounter with the black hole. X-ray and UV data show that the black holes have not completely consumed parts of the stars during the initial encounter, and that they continue their orbits, encountering the black holes again, and again exhibit bright bursts, this activity is called a partial tidal disruption event.
