Scientists have spotted a star being swallowed by a black hole – and it's a record-breaking cosmic mammoth

Astronomers have seen an enormous star being devoured and torn apart by a monster black hole.

And when they took a closer look, they realised that the stellar victim is one of the most enormous stars ever seen eaten by a black hole.

The event, known as a tidal disruption event and given the formal name ASASSN-14li, was spotted in a galaxy 290 million lightyears away in 2014, but astronomers have been studying the aftermath ever since.

Unfortunately for the star, it strayed too close to the black hole and was torn apart.

Much of the star’s gas that was left over remained in orbit around the black hole, but a portion was blown away by strong winds generated by the black hole’s accretion disk.

To study this ejected gas, astronomers used X-ray observatories such as NASA’s Chandra and ESA’s XMM-Newton to observe the stellar debris.

They were able to take spectra of the gas and learn what elements were contained within it.

They found the gas has an abundance of nitrogen, but a lack of carbon.

The unique pattern of elements indicated a single star had been consumed but that the mass of this star was around three times that of the Sun.

If this is the case, it would be perhaps the most massive star ever seen being torn apart like this.

See our coverage of AT2018fyk for another recent example of a tidal disruption event.