NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory discovered a black hole in a distant galaxy that appears to be snacking on a Sun-like star. The satellite’s X-ray Telescope (XRT) observed Swift J0230 for the first time when it lit up in a galaxy around 500 million light-years away in the northern constellation Triangulum.
Swift J0230 has been classified as a repeating tidal disruption of a Sun-like star orbiting a black hole with over 200,000 times the Sun’s mass. The team proposes that the star loses around three Earth masses of material on each pass. This data acts as a bridge between other types of suspected repeating disruptions, thus enabling scientists to model how interactions between different star types and black hole sizes affect what we observe.
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Swift’s hardware, software, and the skills of its international team have enabled it to adapt to new areas of astrophysics over its lifetime. Neil Gehrels, the mission’s namesake, oversaw and encouraged many of those transitions. Now, with this new ability, it’s doing even more cool science,” said Phil Evans, an astrophysicist at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom and longtime Swift team member.
