Breaking news | NASA’s Swift Learns a New Trick, Spots a Snacking Black Hole

#News #Breakingnews #NASA
Using NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which launched in 2004, scientists have discovered a black hole in a distant galaxy repeatedly nibbling on a Sun-like star. The object heralds a new era of Swift science made possible by a novel method for analyzing data from the satellite’s X-ray Telescope (XRT).

“Swift’s hardware, software, and the skills of its international team have enabled it to adapt to new areas of astrophysics over its lifetime,” said Phil Evans, an astrophysicist at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom and longtime Swift team member. “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.”

Evans led a study about the unlucky star and its hungry black hole, collectively called Swift J023017.0+283603 (or Swift J0230 for short), which was published on Sept. 7 in Nature Astronomy.