Monday, May 7, 2012

Black Holes Are Pretty Much the Sharks of Space

Black Hole Devouring Star NASA, S. Gezari (JHU), and J. Guillochon (UC Santa Cruz)

Omnivorous Black Holes Like This One Are Pretty Much the Sharks of Space - -Popular Science

Scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Johns Hopkins University report seeing a phenomenon we've all imagined: a black hole devouring a star.

A black hole at the center of a galaxy about 2.7 billion light-years away, one about the same size as the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way, was observed sucking the life out of a star. Interestingly, the scientists who observed the black hole's meal compared it to a shark: neither, says Ryan Chornock of Harvard-Smithsonian, are unstoppable eating machines.

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