• DOI:10.1038/nature10374
• Corpus ID: 4369797

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

@article{Burrows2011RelativisticJA,
  title={Relativistic jet activity from the tidal disruption of a star by a massive black hole},
  author={David N. Burrows and Jamie A. Kennea and Gabriele Ghisellini and Vanessa Mangano and B. Zhang and Kim L. Page and Michael Eracleous and Patrizia Romano and Takanori Sakamoto and Abraham D. Falcone and Julian P. Osborne and Sergio Campana and Andrew P. Beardmore and A. A. Breeveld and Margaret Mcmath Chester and Robin Corbet and Stefano Covino and Jay R. Cummings and Paolo D’Avanzo and V. D’Elia and Paolo Esposito and P. A. Evans and Dino Fugazza and Jonathan M. Gelbord and Kazuo Hiroi and Stephen T. Holland and K. Y. Huang and Myungshin Im and G. L. Israel and Young Beom Jeon and Young Beom Jeon and Hyunsung D. Jun and Nobuyuki Kawai and J. H. Kim and H A Krimm and F. E. Marshall and P{\'e}ter M{\'e}sz{\'a}ros and Hitoshi Negoro and Nicola Omodei and Won-Kee Park and Jeremy S. Perkins and Mutsumi Sugizaki and Hyun-il Sung and Gianpiero Tagliaferri and Eleonora Troja and Y. Ueda and Yuji Urata and Ryuichi Usui and Lucio Angelo Antonelli and Scott Douglas Barthelmy and G Cusumano and Paolo Giommi and A. Melandri and Matteo Perri and J. L. Racusin and B. Sbarufatti and Michael H. Siegel and Neil A. Gehrels},
  journal={Nature},
  year={2011},
  volume={476},
  pages={421-424}
}

• D. Burrows, J. Kennea, +55 authors N. Gehrels
• Published 1 August 2011
• Physics
• Nature

Supermassive black holes have powerful gravitational fields with strong gradients that can destroy stars that get too close, producing a bright flare in ultraviolet and X-ray spectral regions from stellar debris that forms an accretion disk around the black hole. 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 galaxies, 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 paper 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.