A GIANT black hole has been caught with its hand in the proverbial cookie jar, in the earliest stages of ripping apart and consuming a star.
NASA’s Swift telescope detected several bright bursts of X-rays coming from a black hole 4.5 billion light years away on 28 March. Now two teams say the bursts were probably chunks of a star that was dismembered when it wandered too close to the black hole, which has the mass of a million suns.
While much of the star is destined to be eaten, some of its remains are being spewed out in a jet that Swift spotted (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature10374 and 10.1038/nature10366). Tracking the jet’s development could reveal the stellar victim’s mass.
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