Black hole wakes up to snack on a massive planet

 

 

Astronomers have watched as a black hole woke up from a decades-long slumber to feed on a low-mass object - either a brown dwarf or a giant planet - that strayed too close. A similar feeding event, albeit on a gas cloud, will soon happen at the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way Galaxy. The discovery in galaxy NGC 4845, 47 million light-years away, was made by ESA’s Integral space observatory. The team was studying a galaxy 47 million light-years away when they noticed a bright X-ray flare coming from another location.