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Relativistic jet activity from the tidal disruption of a star by a massive black hole

唐唐添加于 2011-8-27 01:05 | 2668 次阅读 | 0 个评论

作者
Burrows DN, Kennea JA, Ghisellini G, Mangano V, Zhang B, Page KL, Eracleous M, Romano P, Sakamoto T, Falcone AD, Osborne JP, Campana S, Beardmore AP, Breeveld AA, Chester MM, Corbet R, Covino S, Cummings JR, D'Avanzo P, D'Elia V, Esposito P, Evans PA, Fugazza D, Gelbord JM, Hiroi K, Holland ST, Huang KY, Im M, Israel G, Jeon Y, Jeon Y-B, Jun HD, Kawai N, Kim JH, Krimm HA, Marshall FE, P. Mészáros, Negoro H, Omodei N, Park W-K, Perkins JS, Sugizaki M, Sung H-I, Tagliaferri G, Troja E, Ueda Y, Urata Y, Usui R, Antonelli LA, Barthelmy SD, Cusumano G, Giommi ...
摘要
Supermassive black holes have powerful gravitational fields with strong gradients that can destroy stars that get too close1, 2, producing a bright flare in ultraviolet and X-ray spectral regions from stellar debris that forms an accretion disk around the black hole3, 4, 5, 6, 7. The aftermath of this process may have been seen several times over the past two decades in the form of sparsely sampled, slowly fading emission from distant galaxies8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, but the onset of the stellar disruption event has not hitherto been observed. Here we report observations of a bright X-ray flare from the extragalactic transient Swift J164449.3+573451. This source increased in brightness in the X-ray band by a factor of at least 10,000 since 1990 and by a factor of at least 100 since early 2010. We conclude that we have captured the onset of relativistic jet activity from a supermassive black hole. A companion paper15 comes to similar conclusions on the basis of radio observations. This event is probably due to the tidal disruption of a star falling into a supermassive black hole, but the detailed behaviour differs from current theoretical models of such events.
详细资料
- 文献种类: Journal Article
- 期刊名称: Nature
- 期刊缩写: Nature
- 期卷页: 2011年第476卷第7361期 421-424页
- ISBN: 0028-0836
学科领域自然科学 » 天文学
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物理综合
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