High-energy Flares from Swift J1644+57 (IMAGE)

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

High-energy Flares from Swift J1644+57

Caption

Swift's X-Ray Telescope continues to record high-energy flares from Swift J1644+57 more than three months after the source's first appearance. Astronomers believe that this behavior represents the slow depletion of gas in an accretion disk around a supermassive black hole. The first flares from the source likely coincided with the disk's creation, thought to have occurred when a star wandering too close to the black hole was torn apart.

Credit

NASA/Swift/Penn State

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