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Star's Death Dive into Black Hole Mapped by NASA Satellite

Star's Death Dive into Black Hole Mapped by NASA Satellite

The star got too close to its galaxy's central black hole about 290 million years ago, and collisions among its torn-apart pieces caused an eruption of optical, ultraviolet and X-ray light that was first spotted by scientists in 2014. Fresh observations of this radiation by NASA's Swift telescope have yielded more details about where these different wavelengths were generated in the event, which is called ASASSN-14li, a new study reports. "We discovered brightness changes in X-rays that occurred about a month after similar changes were observed in visible and UV light," study lead author Dheeraj Pasham, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a NASA statement.