Birth of Black Hole Possibly Being Observed

TheTXLibra writes "Robert Roy Britt reports on Space.com that we may now be witnessing the earliest stages of black hole development. Star SN 1986J, began to collapse in 1983 into a neutron star, resulting in a supernova explosion in 1986. If the mass of the neutron star reaches 1.4 times the mass of Earth's Sun, it will theoretically collapse into a black hole, if not, it will stabilize as a neutron star."

Comments

Interesting and monumental!

[Alizarin Erythrosin]

Not only is it a cool picture, but this is a pretty interesting thing to witness. In my initial reaction I thought "How can we see this in our lifetimes?" It seems that, as mentioned in the article, "[t]his collapse is extremely fast, and the core collapses into a neutron star in about one second."

The collapse into a black hole in such a short time (also in the article) is somewhat expected, because the gravity will be so strong. This should be a pretty neat and real way to verify if our view on black hole formation and the associated astro-physics that accompany it are mostly correct.

Re:Interesting and monumental!

[CodeMonkey4Hire]

Keep in mind that we are not seeing the formation of a black hole (or neutron star). That was obscured by the supernova remnants. What we [maybe] are now seeing is the youngest black hole (or neutron star) that we have ever observed. 20 years old is barely out of the womb in cosmological terms, but we missed the birth. The only reason that we are getting to see it this early is that we are fortunate enough to line up with a "crack" in the expanding shell of supernova remnants.

Still, very awesome. It will definitely help us with our understanding of supernovas and their aftermath.

It would be really incredible if we could ever find a star that was about to supernova. It would be the most outrageous luck to find it and observe it up until the instant of supernova (I am afraid that we will never get to see the first couple years after that.)