Nasa astronomers have discovered a black hole in a distant galaxy repeatedly nibbling on a Sun-like star, consuming a rate of about three Earth-masses of star material on each pass. https://rb.gy/41bo1
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00:00 Astronomers spotted a black hole
00:04 repeatedly munching on a sunlight star thanks to NASA's Swift satellite.
00:08 When a star gets too close to
00:12 a black hole, gravitational forces cause it to bulge
00:16 and break apart into a stream of gas. This is
00:20 a tidal disruption event.
00:24 In some cases, scientists see what they call "repeating"
00:28 tidal disruptions. That's what's happening here.
00:32 With an outburst called Swift JO230, the sunlight star
00:36 orbits a monster black hole. Every few weeks,
00:40 the star gets so close that the black hole pulls off about
00:44 three Earth masses of material. But the star survives.
00:48 Astronomers saw it in a distant galaxy
00:52 thanks to a new way to analyze data from Swift's X-ray telescope.
00:56 They developed a new way of scanning the instrument's observations
01:00 so that they can quickly identify and study events like these.
01:04 After nearly two decades in space,
01:08 Swift is still learning new tricks and teaching us new things
01:12 about our cosmos.
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