NASA scientists have managed to capture a distant galaxy's dormant black hole shredding and consuming a star.
On March 28, the space agency's Swift telescope detected several bright bursts of X-rays coming from a patch of the sky where no such rays have been detected before.
NASA has said the galaxy is so far away, it took the light from the event approximately 3.9 billion years to reach Earth.
Now two teams of scientists, led by David Burrows of Pennsylvania State University and Ashley Zauderer of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., say the bursts observed were probably chunks of a star that was ripped up when it wandered too close to the black hole.
The star was orbiting the black hole before it was devoured and so it continues to circle around the hole, which reportedly weighs a million suns, as they gradually get swallowed up.
Scientists have seen the aftermath of such tidal disruption events several times, but it's the first time they have seen evidence of this destruction at the onset. It may come in the form of a bright flare of ultraviolet, gamma and X-rays, which can theoretically last for years as the star is gradually consumed.
Now we've seen the start of this event for the first time, study co-author Burrows, an astrophysicist at Penn State, told Space.com.
Zauderer said the seeing the event was nothing like we expected for a gamma-ray burst.
The scientists detailed their findings in two papers in the Aug. 25 issue of the journal Nature.
Davide Lazzati at North Carolina State University in Raleigh told the New Scientist that finding other such outbursts could help reveal the density of stars in the central regions of galaxies, where giant black holes like this one live. This striking video shows the scene:
his illustration steps through the events that scientists think likely resulted in Swift J1644+57.NASA/Goddard Space Flight CentThis still from a NASA video animatino depicts how the black hole black holes, stars & galaxies, how black holes form, nasa swift spacecraft, x-ray astronomy, supermassive black holes Swift J1644+57 is eating a massive star, a process that scientists witnessed for the first time using the Swift satellite.NASA/Swift/Stefan ImmlerThis still from a NASA video animatino depicts how the black hole black holes, stars & galaxies, how black holes form, nasa swift spacecraft, x-ray astronomy, supermassive black holes Swift J1644+57 is eating a massive star, a process that scientists witnessed for the first time using the Swift satellite.NASA/Swift/Stefan ImmlerThis is a visible-light image of GRB 110328A's host galaxy (arrow) taken on April 4 by the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3. The galaxy is 3.8 billion light-years away.NASA/ESA/A. Fruchter (STScI)GRB 110328A has repeatedly flared in the days following its discovery by Swift. This plot shows the brightness changes recorded by Swift's X-ray Telescope.NASA/Swift/Penn State/J. KennePositions from Swift's XRT constrained the source to a small patch of sky that contains a faint galaxy known to be 3.9 billion light-years away. But to link the Swift event to the galaxy required observations at radio wavelengths, which showed that the galaxy's center contained a brightening radio source. Analysis of that source using the Expanded Very Large Array and Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) shows that it is still expanding at more than half the speed of light.NRAO/CfA/Zauderer et al.Swift's X-Ray Telescope continues to record high-energy flares from Swift J1644+57 more than three months after the source's first appearance. Astronomers believe that this behavior represents the slow depletion of gas in an accretion disk around a supermassive black hole. The first flares from the source likely coincided with the disk's creation, thought to have occurred when a star wandering too close to the black hole was torn apart.NASA/Swift/Penn State
