Hubble Telescope & Chandra X-ray Observatory team up to observe GRB 110328A blast. On March 28, 2011, NASA’s Swift satellite caught a flash of high-energy X-rays pouring in from deep space. Swift is designed to do this, and since its launch in 2004 has seen hundreds of such things, usually caused by stars exploding at the ends of their lives, but this time it didn’t see a star exploding as a supernova, it saw a star literally getting torn apart as it fell too close to a black hole!

GRB 110328A is nearly four billion light years away, and it peaked at a solid one trillion times the Sun’s brightness! Although initially catalogued as a GRB, followup observations indicated this was no usual event. The way the light grew and faded seemed to fit better with a star getting torn apart. And what can do that to an entire star? A black hole. So instead of the star in question forming a black hole, it apparently literally fell victim to one!

The observations indicate the black hole in question may have as much as half a million times the mass of the Sun, meaning it’s very probably a super massive black hole in the very centre of a distant galaxy. Hubble Space Telescope observations (not yet released to the public) also place the event very near the centre of a galaxy, which is consistent with this scenario.

This is what Discover Magazine thinks may have happened:-

"In the case of GRB 110328A, something else happened. The galaxy is known to be quiet; NASA’s Fermi satellite can see gamma rays over much of the sky, and has reported no emission from this galaxy for the past couple of years. So whatever happened here was a singular event.
What fits all the data is that of a star orbiting the centre of the black hole. Perhaps it was on a safe orbit but got flung closer to the black hole after a close encounter with another star or gas cloud, or perhaps it started out close and over millions of years its orbit has brought it closer and closer to that monster at the galaxy’s heart. Swift X-ray image of GRB 110328A — a 41 hour exposure! Click to see the large image

Whatever happened, the star’s life ended suddenly and catastrophically. Black holes have incredibly strong gravity, of course, but that gravity gets weaker with distance. Stars are big, a million or more kilometers across, and that means one side of the star was substantially closer to the black hole than the other, so the near side felt a stronger pull of gravity than the far side of the star. This has the effect of stretching the star in a process called tides."

Now NASA's Swift, Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory should give some good data even though this is more than a week later, high-energy radiation continues to brighten and fade from its location.

Astronomers say they have never seen anything this bright, long-lasting and variable before. Usually, gamma-ray bursts mark the destruction of a massive star, but flaring emission from these events never lasts more than a few hours.

The Blog at Nasa.gov expands further:-

"The best explanation at the moment is that we happen to be looking down the barrel of this jet," said Andrew Levan at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, who led the Chandra observations. "When we look straight down these jets, a brightness boost lets us view details we might otherwise miss."

This brightness increase, which is called relativistic beaming, occurs when matter moving close to the speed of light is viewed nearly head on.

Astronomers plan additional Hubble observations to see if the galaxy's core changes brightness.

NASA Goddard manages Swift, and Hubble, and NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages Chandra. The Hubble Space Telescope was built and is operated in partnership with the European Space Agency. Science operations for all three missions include contributions from many national and international partners."

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