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Space Science

Chandra Sees Black Hole Rip Star Apart 332

Posted by timothy from the justin-timberlake-did-it dept.
beeplet writes "Nasa just sent out this press release titled about an exciting Chandra observation. It states: "Thanks to two orbiting X-ray observatories, astronomers have the first strong evidence of a supermassive black hole ripping apart a star and consuming a portion of it. The event, captured by NASA's Chandra and ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray Observatories, had long been predicted by theory, but never confirmed." There is more information on the Chandra home page, including the x-ray and optical observations that were involved in the discovery." Note that the star-ripping pictured on the front page is labeled an illustration, rather than an recorded image.
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Chandra Sees Black Hole Rip Star Apart More

Chandra Sees Black Hole Rip Star Apart

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  • that wasn't a black hole... (Score:5, Funny)

    by cloudship_tacitus ( 709780 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:04PM (#8320356)
    it was just unicron eating one of the autobot mooons.

  • Cheers (Score:2, Interesting)

    by after ( 669640 )
    This is super.

    A lot of astronomers, scientists, and general hobyists were in great doubt that black holes even exist. Now a lot more people will be more interasted in the field (or area) of this study.
    I, on the other hand, was confident. It just makes great sence to me.
    • I find it interesting that we went from thinking black holes were rare, to thinking black holes are pretty common, but super massive black holes [utk.edu] are rare, to black holes are pretty common and we think there are super massive black holes at the center of every galaxy.

      I don't know about you, but I find the phrase "the black hole is feeding" somewhat unsettling.

  • Better headline. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:06PM (#8320384)
    Black hole rips star a new one!

    • Re:Better headline. (Score:5, Funny)

      by bigfatslob ( 748856 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:49PM (#8320793) Journal
      Or better yet,

      Slashdot rips Chandra webserver a new one!

      • Re:Better headline. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ChandraWebAdmin ( 754316 ) on Thursday February 19, 2004 @01:19AM (#8324006)
        Chandra webserver yawns at slashdot's meager attempts. The bulk of our traffic is coming from yahoo news. And while I admit that there were a couple of configuration issues that were brought to my attention earlier, they've been resolved, and things are humming along nicely. Traffic peaked between 8 and 9 (eastern) with over a million hits in that hour.

        If you want the details, we had compiled apache for up to 2048 clients, but had left maxclients set to a meager 512, which caused some problems up until about 7pm eastern, when I bumped maxclients to 1536, and watched as actual connections peaked up around 900. We also had an errant script that was "gracefully" restarting the web server every 15 minutes, which boosted the load up to around 20 (the server actually didn't seem to mind). Fixed that quick.

        The server, by the way is a SunFire 280R (dual 750 MHz) with 4G memory, attached by 100Mbit ethernet (from us to Harvard is gigabit, and from Harvard to the world is something really big). Once the errant script was stopped, load was steady around 1.9 (and I now also realize that there was an incremental backup in progress since about 6pm).

        To paraphrase Kirk:
        "I'm laughing at your superior network."

  • Why they always gotta be racist? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:07PM (#8320388)
    This is just another conspiracy by the white man. First it's black holes distroying this, then dark matter touching that. What's a brother gotta do to earn a little respect in the universe?
  • ...at such rate that there will be no Great Crunch, doesn't mean WE (oour solar system) won't get swallowed by a black hole.

  • Police Investigated further.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Metallic Matty ( 579124 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:08PM (#8320403)
    Police investigation into the brutal act led to one eye witness, Chandra, who described the black hole's violent attack as "gruesome."

    Clip at 11.

  • Don't bother (Score:5, Funny)

    by dr_dank ( 472072 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:10PM (#8320420) Homepage Journal
    strong evidence of a supermassive black hole ripping apart a star and consuming a portion of it

    The goatse jokes pretty much write themselves at this point.

  • Text-only version (Score:5, Informative)

    by after ( 669640 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:10PM (#8320421) Journal
    The site is becoming a little slow already, so here is a text-only version [nasa.gov]. The http://chandra.harvard.edu site seems to be slashdoted already.

  • /dev/null (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymouse Cownerd ( 754174 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:12PM (#8320444) Homepage
    cat star > /dev/null

    i thought black holes were not proven to exist, or am i living in the past?
    • i thought black holes were not proven to exist, or am i living in the past?

      So, what you're saying is, when somebody finds proof of phenomenon XYZ, that doesn't mean anything, because nobody has ever found proof of phenomenon XYZ?

    • Re:/dev/null (Score:5, Insightful)

      by egomaniac ( 105476 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:42PM (#8320725) Homepage
      i thought black holes were not proven to exist, or am i living in the past?

      There is a tremendous amount of evidence favoring the existence of black holes. Whether or not you personally consider this evidence "proof" is up to you. Some people accepted the theory of evolution as soon as Darwin proposed it, while others still don't, despite the unbelievable preponderance of evidence and complete lack of scientific alternatives. In the end, all you have is the evidence, and what you make of it is up to you.

      For what it's worth, virtually every astrophysicist considers the existence of black holes to be a simple fact at this point. As they know a hell of a lot more about the subject than I do, I tend to simply accept their beliefs on such matters. This in no way means that they can't be wrong, but they're much more likely to have things figured out than I am.

      • Re:/dev/null (Score:3, Interesting)

        by dclydew ( 14163 )
        I once spoke to a christian, I asked him why he believed in God, the Bible and Hell... he told me:

        "The Church knows a lot more about the subject than I do, I tend to simply accept their beliefs on such matters."

        I once spoke to a suicide bomber, I asked him why he thought he would go to Heaven by killing... He told me:

        "Our leaders knows a lot more about the subject than I do, I tend to simply accept their beliefs on such matters."

        I once spoke to a Jehovah's Witness, living in a concentration camp in Nazi

    • Re:/dev/null (Score:3, Informative)

      by spanklin ( 710953 )
      i thought black holes were not proven to exist, or am i living in the past?

      There are a number of experiments that show that an object exists at a particular location with an enormous mass and an incredibly small radius. No other object than a black hole fits the data, so we take this indirect evidence as proof of the existence of black holes. From my point of view, the best evidence is the orbit of stars around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Check out a movie [ucla.edu] here.

    • Do Black Holes exist? (Score:5, Informative)

      by whig ( 6869 ) * on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @06:04PM (#8320976) Homepage Journal
      i thought black holes were not proven to exist, or am i living in the past?

      It depends on what one means by "exist," I suppose.

      The phenomenological data supports the existence of black holes, very clearly and without controversy. But what "exists" within the event horizon (the radius at which the gravitational force equals the speed of light) of the object we call a black hole is unobservable, and cannot be described by standard models.

      Consider that the time dilation at the event horizon is "infinite" according to relativity, thus an infalling particle would require infinite time to cross this boundary. On the other hand, the lifespan of the "black hole" is, according to Hawking, finite. Thus, the event horizon would evaporate before the particle crossed it.

      Alternately, the particle might "quantum jump" across the event horizon, this was suggested to me by Dr. Michael Shara at the Space Telescope Science Institute (Johns Hopkins) about 15 years ago. If he's right, black holes may indeed exist.

      Or, the particle might be negated by a Hawking anti-particle before it crosses the event horizon.

      Finally, the particle might only cross the event horizon when it evaporates, which is to say, if and when the black hole becomes a white hole.

  • Now there's an antacid commercial (Score:3, Funny)

    by kammat ( 114899 ) * on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:12PM (#8320446)
    The heartburn after chowing down on one of these has to be brutal. Where do you find a Rolaids or Tums to quench that sucker?

  • Great results from the great X-ray telescopes (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mbrother ( 739193 ) <mbrother.uwyo@edu> on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:12PM (#8320450) Homepage
    I know Stefanie a little bit (overlapped at some meetings). This is her second coup in the last year -- she was also involved with using X-ray observations to identify a binary black hole in another active galaxy. There has been good evidence for such X-ray flaring in the past from ROSAT data alone (now you see it, now you don't), but this is the first time to catch one of these things in the act using XMM and Chandra which are much more capable than the previous generation of X-ray telescopes. XMM can collect more photons, and Chandra can provide image quality equal to that of optical telescopes (telescopes like ROSAT were 100 times worse). We still have no idea how important such stellar disruptions are in the grand scheme of thing, fuelling black holes, etc., but dang, they are cool. I want to put one in a science fiction novel someday.
  • Does anyone have an idea how fast a blackhole 'finishes' a planet?

    I mean, we have a blackhole closing in the Solar System, do we, the puny human, have time to feel anything? And if we do, what kind of thing will be happening on Earth?

    • Re:How fast does a Blackhole consume? (Score:5, Informative)

      by rjelks ( 635588 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:24PM (#8320557) Homepage
      Here's [216.239.53.104] an interesting site (google cache) about black holes. I'm not sure how long it would take, but to an outside observer, it would seem like forever, relatively speaking. :)

    • Doesn't work that way (Score:5, Informative)

      by GunFodder ( 208805 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:37PM (#8320676)
      The gravitational patterns around a black hole are like that of a star until you get very close to it. Just imagine what would happen if a star passed within the planetary space of the Sun. All the planetary orbits would be perturbed. Earth would probably freeze or burn.

      If by some astronomical chance the Earth collided with this black hole the planet would be torn apart first by the differential effect of gravity from the black hole. As an object gets closer to a massive gravity sink it orbits more and more quickly, so the close part of the Earth would be torn from the far part. This process would continue until nothing but gas and sand was left.

      Then this material would rub against itself while orbiting the black hole at high speed, giving off all kinds of EM energy. Eventually the orbits of this debris would decay and would slip inside the event horizon. The contents of that sphere cannot be explained by physics.

      So to answer your question, I think what would probably happen is that first most people would die of starvation as all plants die from the extreme heat/cold. Then most of the remaining survivors would die of asphyxiation as the atmosphere gets ripped off the planet. Then if anyone was left they would be ripped into a fog of dead cells.

      But the bright side is we would probably have plenty of time since we would almost certainly detect a black hole years before it contacted our system. We would see the perturbations caused by its gravity, and black holes cause all kinds of interesting EM radiation when they get close to matter.

      • Re:Doesn't work that way (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The contents of the event horizon can indeed be explained by physics. Read up on your Hawking. He talks about electrons and positrons spontaneously forming and being destroyed and how a certain percentage of them form with one of the pair inside and the other outside such that the black hole loses mass.

        Also, a while ago, there was a physicicst who proposed that just inside the event horizon, where time dialation goes to infinity, a sort of shell of matter forms. This shell expands and contracts with the

    • Re:How fast does a Blackhole consume? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Dylan Zimmerman ( 607218 ) <Bob_Zimmerman@myreal b o x . c om> on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:44PM (#8320745)
      To answer those questions, you have to first understand what it is that a black hole is. It isn't some magical thing that eats whatever it touches. It doesn't have infinitely strong gravity.

      It's just a normal piece of matter like any other. The only difference is that a black hole is dense enough that it can catch light.

      Now, as you approach a black hole, time dialation increases and the apparent event horizon of the black hole decreases. Once you hit the Schwarzchild Radius, there is no escape because there's an infinite red shift on anything moving outwards. However, for you, time would still be passing.

      Black holes cause gravitational distortions sort of like shear forces on a bolt. These shear forces can break matter apart quite effectively. If the black hole is small (like a thin metal plate pushing on the bolt), then it might tear a hole in the matter. If the black hole is big (like a REALLY THICK metal plate), it will still eventually tear you apart, but much more regularly. Really, that second case is analogous to pushing a bolt into a block of metal sideways. The force is fairly even all over the bolt.

      Another problem with the time dialation is that a small enough black hole (with an event horizon say, the size of a pea) would cause things to age differently. Put it near a plate of steel and the steel closest to it would age significantly more slowly than the steel at the edge of the plate.

      To answer your first question, if a black hole was coming to devour us, it would take quite a while as percieved by us, the devoured. The second question is quite different. We would certainly be able to notice a black hole coming to devour us. X-Rays would probably be the best indicator, since black holes are quite powerful X-Ray sources.

      And last, the third question. I don't really know. With a planet-sized or smaller black hole, I would expect the Earth to tear itself apart as the rotational inertia of the side away from the black hole would cause great internal stresses on the Earth. With a large enough black hole, it probably wouldn't be too noticible at all for quite a while. Again, internal stresses would eventually break the Earth apart. However, that would have to be one FREAKISHLY huge black hole. We're talking larger than most stars, here. If the black hole is tiny, it would rip a hole through things, but the Earth might remain intact. It all depends on mass.

      If I'm wrong here, somebody please correct me.

      • Not quite... (Score:4, Informative)

        by Robert1 ( 513674 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @07:54PM (#8321952) Homepage
        Actually you're definition of a blackhole is a bit off.

        Every object has a point at which gravity is so intense that light cannot escape it. This is called the schwarzschild radius. However, black holes are unique in that their radius lies OUTSIDE the object, whereas every non-black hole object's radius lies INSIDE the object.

        The earth, even you or I have this radius too. For the earth however it is underground; were you to attempt to approach it (by digging down for instance) gravitational force would decrease as you decsended. As this force decreases the schwarzschild radius would decrease as a result. Thus you would never be able to reach the schwarzschild radius of the earth because it would always be receeding from you the closer you approached it.
    • I wouldn't worry about it. The current plan is to throw Neptune in the black hole as an appeasement offering long before it gets to us.

      Crap. A perfectly good chance to make a Uranus joke, and I missed it.

  • A Twist (Score:5, Funny)

    by hambonewilkins ( 739531 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:14PM (#8320465)
    In a twist, this time it was the hole tearing a new one.

  • In other news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by drgonzo59 ( 747139 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:16PM (#8320476)
    A radio telescope has captured a wave pattern of a loud burping noise comming from the direction of a supermassive black hole.

  • New Fox special... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Trickster Coyote ( 34740 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:16PM (#8320479) Homepage
    When Black Holes Attack!

  • In Other News... (Score:5, Funny)

    by lexbaby ( 88257 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:16PM (#8320482) Homepage
    Thanks to Darl McBride, executives have the first strong evidence of IBM ripping apart SCO and consuming a portion of it. The event had long been predicted by theory, but never confirmed.

  • Is there.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Creepy Crawler ( 680178 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:17PM (#8320494)
    Any evidence of gravity waves from this? If "gravity waves" do travel at C, this is a good way to see them.

    Or do we have to be outside the solar system to observe them?
    • Any evidence of gravity waves from this?
      Where should the "gravity waves" come from? It's "just" a star being torn apart 700m light years away. Not much different gravitation-wise than if the star had just moved passed the black hole a bit less closely and staying intact. (IANAP)

    • Re:Is there.. (Score:4, Informative)

      by beeplet ( 735701 ) <beeplet@gmail.com> on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:33PM (#8320638) Journal
      We don't have to be outside the solar system to see gravitational waves, but even LIGO wouldn't be sensitive enough to see gravitational radiation from something like this. At best, LIGO might be able to see a neuton star spiralling into a super-massive black hole, because it would be able to fall further in before being torn apart by tidal forces.

    • Re:Is there.. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by forand ( 530402 )
      Currently we do not have any Gravity wave detectors that could observe this, as stated in another reply LIGO could not observe this, nor pretty much anything short of something really strong happening within a VERY close range. We have not observed any gravity waves directly, however we have seen that rotation periods of certian large bodies indicate that energy is escaping the system beyond that predicted by hawking radiation, which is consistent with gravity waves carring said energy away. Hope this hel

  • Cosmic game eh?? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Creepy Crawler ( 680178 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:19PM (#8320511)
    Blue 5 in corner pocket.
  • After eating half a star does anyone suppose the Maitre D said "And finally, monsieur, a wafer-thin mint" to the black hole?

  • Blackholes and Time Travel (Score:5, Interesting)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:23PM (#8320549) Homepage Journal
    For those of you interested in the implications of Black holes on higher dimensions and time travel, CERN is on the verge of producing a large number of black holes [nature.com] at their Large Hadron Collider.

    Physicists at may soon be manufacturing copious quantities of black holes. When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, is completed in 2005, it could produce a black hole every second.

    These tiny, fleeting phenomena might just give researchers a long-sought glimpse of the hidden dimensions of space.

    This development of Black Holes on the planet poses big questions about the dangers and risks involved in handling Black Holes. If one gets out of control, it could potentially "eat" through our planet in no time.

    This story has been getting a lot of attention on other time-travel/astronomy related sites, supposedly because people think it was predicted by a time traveller (do a google search). Just some food for thought.

    • Check out www.johntitor.com

      It has^H^H^Hhad the scoop till another time traveler erased it, and JOhn came back and said it, until some.

      SEGMENTATION FAULT. PARADOX ERROR

    • Re:Blackholes and Time Travel (Score:5, Funny)

      by Loki_1929 ( 550940 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:35PM (#8320654) Journal
      You say this as though anti-matter (also produced in labs) has any less planet-annihilating potential. Basically, we passed the threshold for potential self-annihilation as a species back in the 1940s. Every day we survive is little more than luck. Come to think of it, that we are here at all is a remarkable stroke of luck. Thus, our existence extinguished would be less of a loss to the universe than we would like to believe.

      If we are to destroy ourselves, it would be nice if we could do it in such a way that our life-building components are thrown about the universe so that we might actually father an entire new population on some distant world. Couple billion years of my DNA floating around space and a whole lot of luck could even spawn a whole race of 'Me's!

      I, for one, welcome our new planet-destroying scientist overlords!

      • Re:Blackholes and Time Travel (Score:5, Funny)

        by Hays ( 409837 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @06:26PM (#8321193)
        Anti-matter goes away when it touches normal matter, there's not really any danger of run away chain reaction.

        I guess there could have been fear of run away nuclear reactions destroying the world... Of course we know it won't happen now.

        But fears that run away black holes could eat the planet seem a little more reasonable. Even if the physicists say they will exist for only short periods. It just makes me nervous.

        It just reminds me of someone's conjecture that the reason we don't find any advanced extraterrestrial civilizations in the universe is because they all stumble upon the same technology or experiment that destroys their civilization. And we'll be finding it in the future.

        Ah well... back to building my robot army. That couldn't cause any problems.

    • Re:Blackholes and Time Travel (Score:4, Informative)

      by evilWurst ( 96042 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:39PM (#8320694) Journal
      I know, I know, this is slashdot, and people can't really be bothered to read the articles... but when someone actually links to something, I expect *them* to have read their own article!

      "this too should form black holes. These will be about a million times smaller than the nucleus of an atom and will survive for barely an instant.

      The physicist Stephen Hawking predicted in the 1970s that black holes would evaporate by radiating away their energy. For astrophysical black holes this is a very slow process, but extremely small black holes should last about as long as a snowflake in hell."

      You can stop building that black hole shelter now :)
      • should last about as long as a snowflake in hell

        So, that would be a really long time? According to Dante, the Ninth level of Hell is frozen.

      • Re:Blackholes and Time Travel (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Ralph Spoilsport ( 673134 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @06:13PM (#8321063) Journal
        ...not to be a total grouch, but all of this is assuming that Hawking is correct. We have no proof this is so.

        There is a non-zero probability that one of these blackholes could eat a particle, then another and another and the next thing you know: poof. In a few weeks the moon will orbit a black hole.

        Now, let's see - we have no tests for evaporating black holes, and some geek in Switzerland thinks it's a good idea to do it here on earth. It is likely that Hawking is *probably* correct. But if he's not, we could be TOTALLY fucked. Personally, I'm putting my money on Hawking, but frankly I find this kind of work a bit unnerving. The only justice would be that the first to get ripped into quantal goo would be the dorks at CERN.

        All the more reason for a moon base, IMHO.

        The moonbased atomsmasher could be powered by He3 fusion - right on site. although, if the moon disappeared into a blackhole, we'd get fried by the radiation anyway. Hmmmm.

        All the more reason for a Mars Base, IMHO...

        This way, if Mars gets eaten by a homegrown Blackhole, we'll be less likely to be nuked by the results. Maybe. Aaaaah - nemmind. When the ring gets vapourised by an errant blackhole, the Swiss geeks will say "MEIN GOTT!" just as they are vapourised. Good 'nuff. This sentient life thing was such a crap shoot from the start, anyway.

        RS

        • The Earth is 4.5 or so billion years old, and we're still here. So basically, the odds that anything like this will affect your life is ~0. There are more important things we have to worry about that we actually have control over.
        • The only justice would be that the first to get ripped into quantal goo would be the dorks at CERN.

          No, if a quantum black hole created by the collider did (insert miracle here) manage to survive long enough to start eating atoms, it would, fairly rapidly, drop (well, orbit) to the center of the earth (where it would find higher densities and a lot more to eat). Remember that it's not going to interact with matter much at all at first, so essentially the only force acting on it then would be gravity (the
    • I wouldn't worry too much. Any black hole produced in the LHC will have too little mass to do anything destructive. They will 'evaporate' via Hawking radiation in a matter on nanoseconds.
    • I wish they were doing this on another planet, preferably one in a distant orbit, or better yet orbiting another star. To wit:

      The radiation from evaporating black holes in LHC experiments should signal their brief existence, say Dimopoulos and Landsberg. This would also confirm Hawking's prediction,

      which has never yet been put to the test. [emphesis mine]

      If Stephen Hawking is wrong (and the black holes do not evaporate) this could literally be the end of us all. This strikes me as at least as dangero

      • > in which scientist thought there was a small, but real, chance of igniting the
        > atmosphere and literally roasting everyone and everything on the planet. IIRC it
        > was something like 2% odds ... horrifically high for such a terrible risk).

        Well, no..there wasn't that risk at all. There was *believed* to be such a risk.

        It's like saying train travel is dangerous because people once believed that if you exceeded 15 mph or went through a tunnel then all the passengers would suffocate. It's simply not
        • It doesn't matter that we now know their was no risk of igniting the atmosphere. The fact is that at the time, we didn't know it.

          It's as if someone gave you a gun and said that there's a good chance it's not loaded, but it could be. Do you take the gun, stick it to your head and go *click*? Hell no! Maybe he knows there aren't any bullets in the gun, but you don't. From the knowledge available to you the risk is far too great.

  • We found a WMD! (Score:5, Funny)

    by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:23PM (#8320553) Homepage
    This is great news for both NASA and the Bush administration, as they have now located their first Weapon of Mass Destruction.

    Oh... false alarm.... wrong type of mass...

    • Re:We found a WMD! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by revscat ( 35618 )
      Didn't you get the memo? WMD is so last year. The new hotness is reaching out to social conservatives. You know, opposing gay marriages, increasing funding for anti-porn initiatives, screaming about Janet Jackson's left boob, etc., etc.

  • But... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Loki_1929 ( 550940 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:27PM (#8320595) Journal
    <management idiocy>We don't need these old, damn-near useless satellites.</management idiocy>

  • This is not surprising. (Score:5, Informative)

    by pclminion ( 145572 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:29PM (#8320610)
    They've been examining RX J1242-11 for over a decade. Check out this paper [springer.de] which describes X-ray observations made in 1999, and mentions investigations of this "non-active" galaxy going back to 1990 at least.

    The phenomenon is termed "large-amplitude X-ray variability." It appears that they've finally advanced their models and observation techniques to the point where they are willing to state publicly that this is indeed caused by a black hole. But it's been suspected for years and years.

    • The last paragraph of the press release explains why this is a more convincing observation:

      Other dramatic flares have been seen from galaxies, but this is the first studied with the high-spatial resolution of Chandra and the high-spectral resolution of XMM-Newton. Both instruments made a critical advance. Chandra showed the RXJ1242-11 event occurred in the center of a galaxy, where the black hole lurks. The XMM-Newton spectrum revealed the fingerprints expected for the surroundings of a black hole, rulin

  • Match with Theory? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:33PM (#8320643) Homepage Journal

    I seem to recall that there are theories about how a black hole devours a star, that accelerating ions spiraling inward do emit X-rays.

    Also, something about polar jets of material getting expelled.

    Any evidence of those theories applying, for those of you that know?

  • Written in the stars (Score:5, Funny)

    by StuWho ( 748218 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:38PM (#8320689) Journal
    "Astronomers believe a doomed star came too close to a giant black hole after being thrown off course by a close encounter with another star."

    The same thing happened to Kurt Cobain

  • In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by berkut1337 ( 628381 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:46PM (#8320766)
    Supermassive /. traffic ripped apart a Chandra server and consumed a portion of it.

  • Oh, SNAP! (Score:4, Funny)

    by read-only ( 35561 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @05:49PM (#8320794)
    What that black hole did to that star was just plain wrong!

    Did you see that? That star rolled-up on that black hole, but that black hole wasn't messing aroung. It straight-up punked that star!

    Let this be a lesson to stars everywhere: you better think twice before rolling up on some black hole's turf. Word.

  • Black ? Ripping? Star? I saw it before [pg.gda.pl].

  • Link to AP release (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040218/D80PREA80 .html [myway.com]

    includes "illustration"
  • I'm definately not an astronomer but I recall that the theory of there being a supermassive black hole at the center of each galaxy made a hell of alot of sense when last I saw it presented on Discovery or somesuch. Anyone out there know the status on that theory, and if this particular blackhole that's munching the star is a (struggles for terms then makes some up) galaxy-center-hole or a free-floating-hole?

    Jonah Hex

  • My question is.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SecretSauce ( 247950 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @08:06PM (#8322026) Homepage Journal
    What would happen if two black holes came into close proximity of each other? I don't have enough knowledge about black holes to hypothesize, maybe some of you guys with more background on the subject could shed some light?

    • Re:My question is.... (Score:4, Informative)

      by beeplet ( 735701 ) <beeplet@gmail.com> on Thursday February 19, 2004 @12:38AM (#8323759) Journal
      Two black holes that come too close together will simply merge, becoming a single black hole with the combined mass (or nearly, as some will escape in the form of gravitational radiation during the merger). Such mergers (between stellar-mass black hole binaries, for example) are one of the things LIGO should be able to see in the near future...

      One theory of supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies is that they formed by successive mergers of smaller black holes as smaller galaxies collided to form larger ones. There have been observations of binary black holes in some galaxies, and these will eventually merge... It won't look like anything spectacular to the naked eye, though, since the only energy being released is in the form of gravitational waves.

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