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#1
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06-18-2011, 11:27 AM
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 My Rank: MASTER SERGEANT Poster Rank:517 Join Date: Feb 2009 Posts: 1,977 Mentioned: 0 Post(s) Quoted: 15 Post(s)
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Black Hole Caught Eating a Star
 Some of you will find this very interesting. Earlier this year astronomers spied a burst of high-energy gamma rays emanating from the center of a dwarf galaxy 3.8 billion light-years away. The odd flash, dubbed Sw 1644+57, is one is the brightest and longest gamma ray bursts (GRBs) yet seen. In visible light and infrared wavelengths, the burst is as bright as a hundred billion suns. (Related:"Ultra bright Gamma-ray Burst 'Blinded' NASA Telescope.") "We believe this explosive event was caused by a super massive black hole ten million times the mass of the sun shredding a star that got too close to its gravitational pull," said study leader Joshua Bloom, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley. "The mass of the star fell into the black hole, but along the way it heated up and produced a burst of energy in the form of a powerful jet of radiation, [which] we were able to detect through space-based observatories." (Related:"Giant Black Holes Found at Dawn of the Universe.") While super massive black holes are thought to be lurking at the hearts of most large galaxies, events such as a star getting eaten may happen only once every hundred million years in any given galaxy. "What makes this event even more rare is that we didn't just get a burst of x-ray emissions from the infalling stellar gas, but some of it actually got spit out by the black hole in the form of a gamma ray jet, and we just happen to be looking down the barrel of that jet," Bloom said. "So I would say it's a combination of actually catching a monster black hole in the process of feeding on an unfortunate star that got too close to it, and because we are in a fairly special geometry." It's a long article, you can read the rest here  · |
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#8
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06-19-2011, 12:07 PM
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 *DR's nice guy* Poster Rank:78 Male Join Date: Oct 2009 Posts: 19,438 Mentioned: 89 Post(s) Quoted: 7144 Post(s)
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Re: Black Hole Caught Eating a Star
I thought this thread was going to be Oprah eating one of her guests.
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nice!!!
