--- title: "A Black Hole Inhaled a Star. Then It Started to Shrink" description: "## Death Star" date: "2019-01-12" modified: "2019-01-12" authors: - name: "Jon Christian" job_title: "Executive Editor" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/jonc" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/black-hole-inhaled-started-shrink" categories: - "Astrophysics" - "Black Holes" - "Space" tags: - "Black holes" - "mit" - "NASA" - "the digest" --- # A Black Hole Inhaled a Star. Then It Started to Shrink ![What happened next was weird, even by the standards of super-dense celestial objects from which not even light can escape: the black hole started to shrink.]() *\Image: NASA/CXC/M. WEISS\* ## Death Star This past March, a NASA instrument on the International Space Station spotted a black hole, about 10,000 light-years away from Earth, in the [process of devouring a star](). What happened next was weird, even by the standards of super-dense celestial objects from which not even light can escape: the black hole started to shrink. ## Honey, I Shrunk The Black Holes According to an [MIT blog post]() about the finding, which was described in a [recent paper]() in the journal *Nature*, the size of the black hole's corona — that's the ring of particles that surrounds its mouth — turned into a ghost of its former self. It started with the length of about the width of Massachusetts, according to MIT, and ended up at about ten kilometers — the length of a moderate footrace. Bear in mind that this space monster weighs ten times as much as the Sun and was in the process of inhaling an entire star. ## Corona Light Jack Steiner, a research scientist in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, told the MIT blogger that the observation is a major new finding in the nascent study of black holes. "This is the first time that we’ve seen this kind of evidence that it’s the corona shrinking during this particular phase of outburst evolution," Steiner said. "The corona is still pretty mysterious, and we still have a loose understanding of what it is. But we now have evidence that the thing that’s evolving in the system is the structure of the corona itself." **READ MORE:** [NASA telescope spotted a black hole shrinking after it devoured a nearby star]() \[*Business Insider*\] ***More on black holes: [Physicist: Black Holes Could Be Portals for Hyperspace Travel]()*** ## Author I'm responsible for editing, assigning, and scouting at Futurism, as well as occasionally writing for the site. That work involves keeping an eye on a wide range of narratives and issues, but over the past few years I've become increasingly interested in how AI is shaping the future of media, the web, and information itself. My day-to-day often involves collaborating on reporting and commentary projects bylined by my colleagues, but I try to find time to do my own reporting as well; stories I've broken for Futurism have been cited by publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Wired, Ars Technica, New York Magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review, Bloomberg, and more. I grew up in Southern Vermont and attended Vanderbilt University. Prior to Futurism, I contributed to outlets including the Boston Globe, Vice, Wired, Slate, the Atlantic, the Outline, Ars Technica and more, and did stints in farming and food service. I currently live in Brooklyn, New York, and in my free time I enjoy pinball, word games, cycling, running, and music production. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()