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Destruction of stars by black holes seen

NEW YORK, Oct. 11 (UPI) -- U.S. astrophysicists say they've found evidence of black holes destroying stars, a long-sought phenomenon giving new clues into astrophysical phenomena.

Occasionally, they say, a star's orbit will bring it very near the super-massive black hole at the center of its galaxy, but not so close it's captured whole.

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Gravitational forces holding the star together are overwhelmed, and while some of the star's matter falls into the black hole, much of it continues in erratic orbits and unleashes intense radiation called stellar tidal disruption flares for days or months, researchers at New York University said.

Discovering TDFs in a large-scale, systematic survey using ground-based optical telescopes has now been achieved, an NYU release said Monday.

In a study published in the Astrophysical Journal, researchers said they found compelling evidence of two TDFs through a rigorous analysis of archival data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey of more than 2 million galaxies observed over ten years.

"Searching through 2.6 million galaxies was actually a lot of fun -- there is so much to discover! Based on our search criteria and observing two TDFs that met those criteria, the rate of TDFs is about once per 100,000 years, per galaxy," said Sjoert van Velzen, the study's lead author and a Dutch first-year graduate student who came to NYU to work under Glennys Farr, senior scientist on of the project.

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"It's quite thrilling to have been able to make such a measurement," van Velzen said.

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