Astronomers detect black hole swallowing a star

Los Angeles Times : For the first time, astronomers say they’ve borne witness to a supermassive black hole consuming a star, writes Amina Khan for the Los Angeles Times. On 28 March a detector on the Earth-orbiting Swift observatory picked up a sudden burst of radiation from a point in the constellation Draco, 4.5 billion light-years away. Typically the gamma-ray bursts that Swift was designed to detect are one-time events caused by an exploding star. In this instance, however, subsequent bursts were detected from the same spot, which convinced the researchers that the origin was not a supernova exploding. David Burrows of the Pennsylvania State University and colleagues have proposed instead that a star about the same size as our Sun ended up too close to the black hole, which caused the side of the star nearest the black hole to stretch toward it, in much the same way that the Moon causes the tides on Earth. As the gravitational forces shredded the star, chunks of its plasma streamed toward the black hole, and some of the material was expelled into a jet of high-energy radiation. That jet was likely responsible for the mysterious burst detected in March. The astronomers say they were lucky to witness the event—the jet of radiation just happened to blast straight toward Swift, like a flashlight beamed in the face. Their results were published yesterday in Nature.