Powerful cosmic blast as black hole shreds star
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13783877
Astronomers have spied a star’s swan song as it is shredded by a black hole.
Researchers suspect that the star wandered too close to the black hole and got sucked in by the huge gravitational forces.
The star’s final moments sent a flash of radiation hurtling towards Earth.
The energy burst is still visible by telescope more than two-and-a-half months later, the researchers report in the journal Science.
The Swift spacecraft constantly scans the skies for bursts of radiation, notifying astronomers when it locates a potential flare.
These bursts usually indicate the implosion of an aging star, which produces a single, quick blast of energy.
But this event, first spotted on 28 March 2011 and designated Sw 1644+57, does not have the marks of an imploding sun.
What intrigued the researchers about this gamma ray burst is that it flared up four times over a period of four hours.
Astrophysicist Dr Andrew Levan from the University of Warwick, and his colleagues suspected that they were looking at a very different sort of galactic event; one where a passing star got sucked into a black hole.
The energy bursts matched nicely with what you might expect when you “throw a star into a black hole”, Dr Levan told BBC News.
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hey..where did it go? answer me that..
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