Scientific data obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope, from NASA and ESA, they captured a brutal black hole that earns the title of star devourer. Experts are surprised with the speed and quantity of stars it ate in the time they were observing it.
Specific, according to a NASA reportscientists were studying NGC 3156. This is a lenticular galaxy, with two visible strands of dark reddish-brown dust crossing the disk of the galaxy, which is located about 73 million light years from Earth, in the constellation minor equatorial Sextans.
This type of galaxy is called lenticular because of its lens-like appearance when viewed from the side or edge-on, NASA says on its website.
Its location is somewhere between elliptical and spiral galaxies and amazes experts because it records properties of both. Like spirals, lenticulars have a central bulge of stars and a large disk that surrounds them.. And they often have spiral-like fringes of dark dust, but not large-scale spiral arms. Like ellipticals, lenticular galaxies have mostly older stars and little ongoing star formation.
Astronomers have studied NGC 3156 in many ways: from its cohort of globular clusters (roughly spherical groups of stars held together by their gravitational pull) to the stars being destroyed by the supermassive black hole at its heart.
At the center of the galaxy NGC 3156 is a supermassive black hole, with an estimated mass of about 10 million solar masses. This black hole is responsible for the X-ray emission observed from the galaxy.
Using Hubble data, they compared stars close to the galaxy’s core with those in galaxies with black holes of similar size. They found that NGC 3156 has an above-average percentage of stars devoured by its supermassive black hole compared to its counterparts.