Chinese satellite captures black hole swallowing star

The Chinese satellite Tianguan, also known as the Einstein Probe, has reportedly captured the process of a medium-mass black hole tearing apart and swallowing a white dwarf star. As reported by China Daily, a partner of TV BRICS. 

According to the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), this is the first time such an extreme event has been recorded.

During a routine survey of the sky on 2 July 2025, the satellite's wide-angle X-ray telescope detected an unusually bright and rapidly changing source of X-ray radiation. This event prompted a broad campaign of observations using a variety of telescopes operating in different wavelength ranges. 

The properties of the flare, including its brightness variation, radiation directionality diagram, and spectral features, differed significantly from those of any known cosmic explosion.

A research team from the NAOC offered a persuasive explanation. They suggested the event was caused by the tidal disruption of a white dwarf by a medium-mass black hole. During tidal disruption, a star passing too close to a supermassive black hole is torn apart by its powerful gravitational forces.

"This phenomenon closely resembles the rare occurrence of a jetted tidal disruption event, where a black hole tears apart a star," explained Zhang Wenda, an associate researcher at the NAOC.  

A white dwarf is a superdense celestial body that remains after the death of a star. Its average density can be up to a million times greater than that of the Sun. Theory indicates that only medium-mass black holes with masses ranging from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of suns are capable of ripping such a compact object rather than swallow it whole.

Scientists believe this process is thought to cause a brief, intense burst of energy, which is likely to be accompanied by a bright, fast-moving jet of plasma. This phenomenon is consistent with the rapid evolution and extreme luminosity observed by the satellite.

Stars that pass sufficiently close to black holes can be destroyed by intense tidal forces, generating strong electromagnetic flares. More than 100 such events have been documented so far, but almost all of them involved ordinary gas stars. In those cases, the stellar debris falls onto the black hole for years, sustaining prolonged flares, the researchers noted.