Dying Star Provides New Opportunities For Testing Relativity Aug
08, 2012 Swift is a space-based gamma ray telescope designed to
react quickly to locate and observe gamma ray bursts. On March
28, 2011, Swift detected a burst in the constellation Draco.
Designated Sw J1644+57, the astronomers using Swift quickly
identified the source as the black hole at the center of a
galaxy about 3.9 billion light years from Earth. But, rather
than fading quickly the way a gamma-ray burst normally behaves,
Sw J1644+57 continued to glow for a few months. The source had
to be something more unusual. When a small object like a star
gets too close to a black hole, the pull of gravity is strong
enough to strip the outer layers off the star (see the
animation, below.) However, rather than falling straight in to
the black hole, the gas begins to orbit, spiraling down toward
the center and forming a disk called an accretion disk. The
closer it gets to the black hole, the faster it orbits and the
hotter it gets. Some of the superhea