Scientists have found a star that survived a rapprochement with a black hole. But she still can't survive

Scientists recorded the event using the Chandra and XMM-Newton telescopes in early February - then previously unknown

A red giant (an intermediate stage of a star's existence during which it sheds its outer layers) has come too close to the black hole GSN 069.

The mass of GSN 069 is 400 thousand times the mass of the Sun, it belongs to the category of supermassive black holes. The object is located at a distance of 250 thousand light years from Earth.

Observations have shown that when approaching blackhole, its gravity stripped away the upper layers of the star, turning it into a white dwarf - the next stage in the evolution of a star after a red giant. But after that, for an unknown reason, the black hole pushed the object into a distant orbit.

Now the white dwarf rotates in an ellipticalorbit around the black hole, making a complete revolution every eight hours. At the same time, GSN 069 is gradually pulling matter out of the star - this means that in the near future it will die anyway.

"The star will struggle to leave,but there is no salvation. The black hole will eat it more and more slowly, but will never stop, even after the white dwarf shrinks to the size of Jupiter. This will happen in about a trillion years."

Andrew King, lead author of the study

Earlier astronomers from the University of Iowa duringObservations of seismic fluctuations in the bowels of two red giants revealed that the orbit of an exoplanet orbiting one of them is so small that it floats inside rarefied but hot outer shells of the star. In other words, it is actually inside the star.