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It is known that a star that wanders too close to a Black Hole can be shredded and consumed by the immense gravitational force.

In a paper published in the journal Science, astronomers observed not just the star's demise, but the black hole then ejecting a flare of matter at very close to light speed.

"These events are extremely rare," said lead author Sjoert van Velzen, a Hubble fellow at Johns Hopkins University. "It's the first time we see everything from the stellar destruction followed by the launch of a conical outflow, also called a jet, and we watched it unfold over several months."

The star is about the same size as the sun, was first observed slipping from its trajectory into the gravitational field of the black hole by a team of researchers from Ohio State University, who announced their discovery in December of last year.

"Previous efforts to find evidence for these jets, including my own, were late to the game," Velzen said.

He coordinated a team of 13 other astronomers from the US, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Australia, using an array of ground-based telescopes to gather radio, X-ray and optical data to put together a multi-wavelength portrait of the event.

Black Holes are difficult to study because it cannot be seen. They only way astronomers can study black holes is by studying their effect on the space around them, including what they consume and what they emit.

Devouring a star, will result in jets of material and plasma shooting from the black hole's poles. According to one hypothesis, jets will form as material falls towards the black hole; it is superheated and ejected along the black hole's spin axis, confined to a narrow, conical jet by strong magnetic fields.

"The destruction of a star by a black hole is beautifully complicated, and far from understood," van Velzen said. "From our observations, we learn the streams of stellar debris can organize and make a jet rather quickly, which is valuable input for constructing a complete theory of these events."