Astronomers See Another Star Torn Apart By a Black Hole 127
The Bad Astronomer writes "A star in a galaxy 2.7 billion light years away wandered too close to a supermassive black hole and suffered the ultimate fate: it was literally torn apart by the black hole's gravity. The event was seen as a flash of ultraviolet light flaring 350 times brighter than the galaxy itself, slowly fading over time. Astronomers were able to determine that some of the star's material was eaten by the black hole, and some flung off into space. Although rare, this is the second time such a thing has been seen; the other was just last year."
Re:Will black hole devour dark matter, anti-matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, antimatter is seen all the time. Heck, the "P" in "PET scan" stands for "positron", the electron's antiparticle. As for dark matter, it's "seen" in gravitational effects, which is admittedly indirect and somewhat inconclusive. Still, humans are rather biased. The matter you're made out of is mostly quarks and electrons. Quarks are affected by all four fundamental forces: (G)ravity, (E)lectromagnetism, (W)eak, and (S)trong. Electrons are only affected by GEW. Neutrinos have just GW and are therefore hard to detect. Maybe there's matter that's just affected by G; it would only show up on cosmological scales like dark matter seems to.
Quoting myself [slashdot.org],
Who knows? Maybe there's a whole segment of matter humans are unfamiliar with which interacts very little with the matter we know about but interacts with itself in complicated ways. Maybe there are dark matter solar systems populated by dark matter people who are just as confused as we are about the weird gravitational anomalies caused by our otherwise invisible existence. Communicating through gravity would certainly be an interesting challenge! I don't really believe this, but my point is basically the same as Hamlet's: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy"--that is, it's arrogant to expect humans to be in a position to observe all the parts of the universe. Perhaps some things are just hidden.
Another recent post of mine in this vein is a summary of particle classifications [slashdot.org].
Re:Will black hole devour dark matter, anti-matter (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll grant you the antimatter issue, but I still like my tongue-in-cheek jab at the GGP for saying that dark matter wouldn't be "seen" after falling into a black hole. It is "dark" after all, meaning it cannot be seen in the human sense of the word, so the difference between it being in a black hole and not being in a black hole is visibly none.
Of course, the really interesting thing is that it's possible that the actual act of falling into a black hole is the only thing that would ever make dark matter visible. So it would never be seen before, or after, but possibly could be seen *during* its descent into the singularity.