Scientists discovered a black hole in a distant galaxy repeatedly nibbling on a Sun-like star.
Scientists made the discovery using NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which launched in 2004.
According to NASA, when a star gets too close to a monster black hole, gravitational forces create intense tides that break the star apart into a stream of gas. The leading edge swings around the black hole, and the trailing edge escapes.
That’s what’s called a tidal disruption event. Astronomers see them as flares of multiwavelength light created when the debris collides with a disk of material already orbiting the black hole.
Astronomers have recently been investigating what they are calling partial or repeating tidal disruptions. During these partial tidal disruptions, every time an orbiting star passes close to a black hole, the star bulges outward and sheds material -- but it survives. The process repeats until the star loses too much gas and breaks apart.
On June 22, 2022, the XRT captured Swift J0230 for the first time. It lit up in a galaxy around 500 million light-years away. Swift’s XRT has observed nine more outbursts from the same location roughly every few weeks.
Scientists propose that Swift J0230 is a repeating tidal disruption of a Sun-like star orbiting a black hole with over 200,000 times the Sun’s mass. They believe the star is losing around three Earth masses of material on each pass.
You can learn more about this event on NASA’s website.
---> University of Michigan scientists study giant black hole that destroyed a massive star