The discovery by University of Leicester astronomers was reported on September 7 in the journaland provides a ‘missing link’ in our knowledge of black holes disrupting orbiting stars. It suggests a whole menagerie of stars in the process of being consumed that still lie undiscovered.Discovery Details
An optical image of the galaxy in which the new event occurred, taken from archival PanSTARRS data. The X-ray object was located to somewhere inside the white circle, which is about the size a pinhead 100m away would appear. The position of a 2-year-old supernova is also shown. Credit: Daniele B.
Dr. Rob Eyles-Ferris, who works with Dr. Evans on the Swift satellite, recently completed his PhD at Leicester, which included the study of stars being disrupted by black holes. He explains: “In most of the systems we’ve seen in the past the star is completely destroyed. Swift J0230 is an exciting addition to the class of partially-disrupted stars as it shows us that the two classes of these objects already found are really connected, with our new system giving us the missing link.”Dr.
They estimate that the black hole is around 10,000 to 100,000 times the mass of our sun, which is quite small for the supermassive black holes usually found at the center of galaxies. The black hole at the center of our own galaxy is thought to be 4 million solar masses, while most are in the region of 100 million solar masses.