Falling into a black hole gif
![falling into a black hole gif falling into a black hole gif](http://www.thestargarden.co.uk/Images/Supermassive-black-hole-animation.gif)
We need to know its mass to help pinpoint a lot of those details." Also, people want to understand the physics of black holes and how they affect the geometry of space-time around them. "We know that there are strong connections between black holes and the galaxies they reside in, and it turns out that somehow the mass of the black hole and the mass of a galaxy influence each other, so we want to better know what's going on there. "These spectacular events provide a glimpse into otherwise unobservable black holes, telling us about their masses," Gezari said. The astronomers estimate the black hole's mass to be 3 million suns, comparable to our Milky Way's central black hole. This in turn helped reveal at what point and time the black hole had begun disrupting the star, revealing how powerful its gravitational field was and thus its mass. By measuring the rise of the flare's brightness, the scientists calculated the rate at which the star's gas was getting sucked into the black hole. The flare of light reached peak brightness a month after it was detected, then slowly faded over the next 12 months. "We are seeing the glow from the stellar gas falling into the black hole over time." "When the star is ripped apart by the gravitational forces of the black hole, some part of the star's remains falls into the black hole while the rest is ejected at high speeds," Gezari said. In June 2010, the researchers spotted a bright flare from the previously dormant black hole at the center of a galaxy approximately 2.7 billion light-years away. To detect one such event, Gezari and her colleagues monitored hundreds of thousands of galaxies in ultraviolet light with the space-based Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) and in visible light with the Hawaii-based Pan-STARRS telescope. Astronomers say supermassive black holes rip apart stars very rarely, maybe just once every 10,000 years per galaxy.