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Chandra Sees Black Hole Rip Star Apart
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.
You realize that for something to be "100 times worse" than something else, you have to define a standard for how bad something is. Here's an example.
Item A costs $.99
Item B costs $.94
Item B's manufacturers decided to use $1.00 as the arbitrary standard for expensiveness.
Item B is 5 times less expensive than Item A
Now, you can say that the older telescopes had 1/100th the resolution or that the new ones are 100 times better, but something being 100 times worse than something else makes NO sense at all unless you have a reference to measure from. You can only use 0 as that reference if you're measuring AWAY from it.
I happen to know the black hole personally, and he told me with a certain degree of sympathy that the star in question told the black hole, "I sure could go for a bite about now." Being the kind individual the black-hole is, he took the matter into his own hands, or... mouth.
Learn something new.
But there certainly is something inherently unsafe about oppression (lack of liberty): it is achieved by the initiation of force.