2023-09-08 21:30:00
NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, launched in 2004, identified a distant galaxy’s black hole devouring a Sun-like star. The discovery was only possible through a new method of analyzing data from the satellite’s X-ray Telescope (XRT).
According to the United States space agency, the black hole and its star are called Swift J023017.0+283603 or Swift J0230. The two are in a galaxy named 2MASX J02301709+2836050, in the Triangulum constellation, more than 500 million light years away.
Despite being seen in a more stoic light in films and images, black holes are hardly inert. They are some of the densest objects in the universe and the environments that surround them are extremely energetic.
Black holes accumulate matter around them in disks and gorge themselves on the superheated material that falls into their event horizons, the region beyond which not even light can escape these space phenomena.
When a star becomes gravitationally trapped by a black hole, this phenomenon sucks material from it each time it approaches. A black hole feeds itself over timein what is known as a repetitive tidal disruption event.
Swift J0230 appears to be one such event, although it is hardly the first and last. In any case, this black hole, with more than 200,000 times the mass of the Sun, is swallowing the star equivalent to three Earth masses very slowly.
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