Giant Black Hole Devours Star, Fires Beams at Earth

Artist’s impression of the formation of two jets of energy at Swift 1644+57.
Credit: University of Warwick / Mark A. Garlick

A powerful beam of energy has been spotted blasting out from the center of a massive black hole as it rips apart and devours a star in a rare sight that astronomers say likely happens only once every 100 million years, a new study finds.

When a NASA satellite first detected the intensely bright flash deep in the cosmos, astronomers initially thought it was a powerful burst of gamma rays from a collapsing star, one of the most powerful types of explosions in the universe. But, when the tremendous amount of energy could still be seen months later, they realized something more mysterious was going on.

This is a really, really unusual event, study co-author Joshua Bloom,assistant professor of Astronomy at University of California, Berkeley, told SPACE.com. It's now about two-and-a-half months old, and the fact that it just continues on and is only fading very slowly is the one really big piece of evidence that tells us this is not an ordinary gamma-ray burst.

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