• DOI:10.1126/science.1207143
• Corpus ID: 13118370

An Extremely Luminous Panchromatic Outburst from the Nucleus of a Distant Galaxy

@article{Levan2011AnEL,
  title={An Extremely Luminous Panchromatic Outburst from the Nucleus of a Distant Galaxy},
  author={Andrew J. Levan and Nial R. Tanvir and S. Bradley Cenko and Daniel A. Perley and Klaas Wiersema and Joshua S. Bloom and Andrew S. Fruchter and Antonio de Ugarte Postigo and P. T. O’Brien and Nathaniel R. Butler and Alexander J. van der Horst and Giorgos Leloudas and Adam N. Morgan and Kuntal Misra and Geoffrey C. Bower and Jay Farihi and Rachel L. Tunnicliffe and Maryam Modjaz and Jeffrey M. Silverman and Jens Hjorth and Christina C. Th{\"o}ne and A. Cucchiara and Jose Maria Castro Ceron and Alberto J. Castro-Tirado and Jacob A. Arnold and Michael Bremer and Jean P. Brodie and T. C. Carroll and Michael C. Cooper and Peter A. Curran and Roc M. Cutri and John Ehle and Duncan A. Forbes and Johan P. U. Fynbo and Javier Gorosabel and John F. Graham and Douglas I. Hoffman and Sergei S. Guziy and P. Jakobsson and Atish Kamble and Tom H. Kerr and Mansi M. Kasliwal and Chryssa Kouveliotou and Daniel Kocevski and Nicholas M. Law and Peter E. Nugent and Eran. O. Ofek and Dovi Poznanski and Robert M. Quimby and Evert Rol and Aaron J. Romanowsky and R. S{\'a}nchez-Ram{\'i}rez and Steve Schulze and N. Singh and L. van Spaandonk and Rhaana L. C. Starling and Richard G. Strom and J. C. Tello and Ovidiu Văduvescu and Peter J. Wheatley and Ralph Wijers and Jack M. Winters and D. S. Xu},
  journal={Science},
  year={2011},
  volume={333},
  pages={199 - 202}
}

• A. Levan, N. Tanvir, +60 authors D. Xu
• Published 17 April 2011
• Physics
• Science

A recent bright emission observed by the Swift satellite is due to the sudden accretion of a star onto a massive black hole. Variable x-ray and γ-ray emission is characteristic of the most extreme physical processes in the universe. We present multiwavelength observations of a unique γ-ray–selected transient detected by the Swift satellite, accompanied by bright emission across the electromagnetic spectrum, and whose properties are unlike any previously observed source. We pinpoint the event to the center of a small, star-forming galaxy at redshift z = 0.3534. Its high-energy emission has lasted much longer than any γ-ray burst, whereas its peak luminosity was ∼100 times higher than bright active galactic nuclei. The association of the outburst with the center of its host galaxy suggests that this phenomenon has its origin in a rare mechanism involving the massive black hole in the nucleus of that galaxy.