Artist’s impression of initial stages of a star’s disruption by black hole. Credit: Mark Garlick, University of Warwick, UK. (Above) A colour image of the event observed through the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Credit: A Levan, University of Warwick, UK

New Delhi, June 16: Some 3.8 billion years ago, around the time that the earliest single-celled organisms were stirring on Earth, a massive black hole in a distant galaxy ripped a wayward star into shreds and gobbled it up.

An international team of astronomers has now spotted evidence of that encounter, analysed it and labelled it an astral spectacle never observed before in human history.

The flashes from that event suggest it was caused by a black hole about 10 million times the mass of the Sun, tearing apart a Sun-like star in a distant uncatalogued galaxy, the astronomers said. Their findings will appear today in the US journal Science.

“It’s reasonably safe to say this is the first time mankind has observed such an event,” Joshua Bloom, a team member and associate professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, told The Telegraph.

Astronomers have earlier observed massive black holes — the remnants of oversized stars that have collapsed under gravity to a state where their intense gravitational pulls prevent even light from escaping — swallowing stars. But this is the first time a black hole has been seen disrupting a star in a spectacular manner, producing flashes 10 to 100 times brighter than the brightest active galaxies.

“We were very lucky,” said Andrew Levan, a team member at the University of Warwick in the UK. “The jet of energy (released by the matter falling into the black hole) was beamed straight at us,” Levan said.

An orbiting space telescope picked up the initial flashes of gamma ray bursts from the event on March 28 this year. But instead of quickly fading away as do most gamma ray bursts, the flashes persisted and displayed signatures of the gravitational disruption of a star by the black hole. Over the next few weeks, astronomers used more telescopes in space to study the event in finer detail.

The jet of energy pointing towards Earth provides astronomers a unique vista. “It’s as if people are looking up close at an elephant — most would see the same thing — grey, rough skin, but the persons looking into the trunk which spits water into their faces would say something very different about their elephant experience,” Bloom said.

“We’ve had a special vantage point on a rare but not unseen event.”