Star turning into a black hole gif12/15/2023 ![]() The gas is corralled into a disk that swirls around the black hole and becomes rapidly heated to temperatures of millions of degrees. As a star falls toward a black hole, it is ripped apart by intense tides. ![]() According to the new studies, the black hole in the galaxy hosting Swift J1644+57 may be twice the mass of the four-million-solar-mass black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Most galaxies, including our own, possess a central supersized black hole weighing millions of times the sun’s mass. It examines the unprecedented outburst through observations from numerous ground-based radio observatories, including the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA) near Socorro, N.M. The second study was led by Ashley Zauderer, a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. 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. Astronomers believe that this behavior represents the slow depletion of gas in an accretion disk around a supermassive black hole. 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. It highlights the X- and gamma-ray observations from Swift and other detectors, including the Japan-led Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI) instrument aboard the International Space Station. The galaxy is so far away, it took the light from the event approximately 3.9 billion years to reach Earth.īurrows’ study included NASA scientists. Credits: NRAO/CfA/Zauderer et al.Īstronomers soon realized the source, known as Swift J1644+57, was the result of a truly extraordinary event - the awakening of a distant galaxy’s dormant black hole as it shredded and consumed a star. 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. ![]() 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. Positions 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.
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