(Credit: NASA/Swift/Aurore Simonnet, Sonoma State University)
We can’t — yet — directly see black holes, making finding one of these elusive beasts hard, especially since a great majority of them are dormant. But researchers at the University of Maryland, NASA Goddard, and the University of Michigan recently caught one of these sleeping giants waking up to slurp on a big snack: a passing star.
Called Swift J1644+57, the black hole is about 3.8 billion light-years away at the center of a relatively quiet galaxy. The supermassive black hole was initially spotted in 2011 when a passing star woke the hungry giant up. The black hole, which is itself invisible, shredded the material of the star into an accretion disk as it feasted, giving researchers a window into its activity. The new study, published today in Nature, outlines a unique phenomenon just discerned from the event: so-called X-ray reverberation, in which ...
