London, Aug 25 (ANI): NASA's Swift satellite have spotted a truly extraordinary event, the awakening of a distant galaxy's dormant black hole as it shredded and consumed a star.
Two new studies provide new insights into a cosmic accident that has been streaming X-rays toward Earth since late March.
NASA's Swift satellite first alerted astronomers to intense and unusual high-energy flares from the new source in the constellation Draco.
"Incredibly, this source is still producing X-rays and may remain bright enough for Swift to observe into next year," said David Burrows, professor of astronomy at Penn State University and lead scientist for the mission's X-Ray Telescope instrument.
"It behaves unlike anything we've seen before," he stated,
Astronomers soon realized the source, known as Swift J1644+57, was the result of the awakening of a distant galaxy's dormant black hole as it shredded and consumed a star.
The galaxy is so far away that it took the light from the event approximately.9 billion years to reach Earth.
The second study was led by Ashley Zauderer, a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
It examines the unprecedented outburst through observations from numerous ground-based radio observatories, including the National Radiostronomy Observatory's Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA) near Socorro, N.M.
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 centre of the Milky Way galaxy.
The studies were reported in the Aug. 25 issue of the journal Nature. (ANI)
|
|
Read More: Ray
Comments:
