Black Hole Birth Detected this Morning

An anonymous reader writes "SPACE.com is reporting on the first optical afterglow ever detected from a short-duration (milliseconds) Gamma-Ray Burst. The GRB signals the birth of a black hole resulting from a merger between two neutron stars. Theory had predicted the whole thing, which was all spotted this morning by NASA's Swift satellite and ground-based observatories, thanks to an automated email system that notifies astronomers worldwide."

Comments

Excuse ME

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing Quantum for you to see here. Please move along in a femtosecond.

God

[rgf71]

It's just god doing goatse.cx

Space the final Frontier

[Boogiesbunny]

"Mr. Scott I need your warp 8 speed now"...."Captain I'm giving you all that I can muster"

Re:LA-LA-LA-LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU

[Shadow Wrought]

If you didn't catch last night's Simpson's, you really should. Homer gets caught up in the "Left Below" craze. Pretty sharp satire.

Re:Fate of Black Holes.

[tomhudson]

Of course black holes exist. All they had to do was point their telescopes towards Maureen O'Gara's head. A perfect vacuum. NOTHING exists in there - it's a gate towards an alternate reality.

I HATE MOGs

I *really* *hate* MoGs.

The WalMart down the road was selling Mini Maureen O'Gara Trolls (MoGTrolls) for 2 cents a piece. That was even less than the 5 cents a piece I paid for those damn monkeys ... so I figured "What have I got to loose?"

So I bought 250 MoGTrolls for $5.00. I mean, what's 5 buck, right? What could possibly go wrong?

I took my 250 MoGTrolls home. I have a big car. One of them insisted on driving. Its' name was Maureen O'Gara (all the MoGTrolls answer to Maureen O'Gara). It was retarded, even for a troll. In fact, now that I had them outside in the daylight, it was obvious that they were all "more than a few bricks short of a full load." I couldn't let the MoGTroll drive, so I kicked it in the head. It LIKED being kicked in the head! WTF? So I obliged it by kicking it some more. Soon, all the MoGTrolls were kicking each other and giggling like crazy, snot running down their ugly troll faces. This made it hard to drive, but we finally made it home.

I herded them into the basement. They didn't adapt well to their new environment. They stopped kicking each other, and just sulked. Then they began pulling the hair out of each other. It quickly became am ess. Oh, and nobody told me that MoGTrolls aren't toilet trained. I googled and yahoo'd for "toilet training MoGTrolls", but all that came back was "lots of luck, sucker!" and "never been done."

The novelty of having 250 MoGTrolls had worn off.

The MogTrolls got out of the basement and kept trying to use my computers, even though everyone knows that MoGTrolls can't write for shit. They kept on, though, and started posting all sorts of weird, distorted stuff. I mean REALLY bent! So my ISP cut me off. I hate MoGTrolls.

I had to find another ISP. And the damn MoGTrolls got me kicked off that one, too. I went from high-speed cable to adsl to dialup to - well, lets just say that TCP/IP over a clothesline really sux. I can only post when my neighbours are doing their laundry. I feel SO low having to steal bandwidth through their underware flapping in the breeze!

Did I mention that I hate MoGTrolls?

At least by now I knew why the MoGTrolls were so cheap - nobody would want one. All they do is sit around and make rambling random noise and emit noxious vapours, and excrete stuff that even the dogs don't want to sniff ... and dogs will eat their own puke!

I didn't know what to do - I was at wits end. So I went out to the local Home Depot and bought some muriatic acid, the stuff you use on concrete. I took one of the MoGTrolls and dipped it into the muriatic acid. The acid turned into goo. I poored some on the sidewalk outside, and it quickly melted the ice. Unfortunately, it also completely removed the top inch of concrete. The city had to replace the sidewalk. I got the bill last week. I hate MoGTrolls.

I decided to kill them all and throw them in the garbage. Do you have any idea how HARD it is to kill a MoGTroll? They're worse than cockroaches! You can drop a load of bricks on them, squish them flatter than a penny after the train's gone over it, and next morning they're back at it again, spitting, being mean, and just looking butt-ugly as usual.

So I tried to have a garage sale. I TRIED to make them look half-way decent, but MoGTrolls are like SCO stock - no amount of lipstick will make that pig look good. Not only did I not sell a single MoGTroll; the police gave me a fine for disturbing the peace. All the kids in the neighbourhood are having nightmares, and the school has to have a psychologist on staff full-time to deal with all the trauma that being exposed to a whole herd of MoGTrolls can cause in young minds. I hate MoGTrolls.

I tried to flush one down the toilet. It didn't w

Re:Weak!

[caino59]

Yah know - religious zealots know not to take everything in the bible as 100% literal - parables and whatnot...

You would think that maybe, just maybe, they'd realize that maybe God's creation 'week' wasn't a week with days as we know them - 1 day could equate to thousands of years...

Re:Weak!

[sickofthisshit]

Or maybe you'd realize that Genesis is no more accurate than the Hindu or Shinto or Greek or Babylonian creation myths.

This kind of "well, if you squint your eyes, it looks partly accurate" is the most pathetic type of grade-school apologetics. The language is pretty damn clear, and it meant "day" not "uh, could be a day, could be billions of years, but whichever it is, this story is still 100% completely accurate, so believe it."

Anyhow, with that absolutely incisive analysis "day == thousands of years" are we all supposed to slap our foreheads, and say, "Oh, my. Now I understand that Genesis IS 100% true, I just need the right decoder ring. I'll stop looking through my telescope now, because it is all right there in the Good Book. Thanks, caino59, you've made my life better."

Next, I'll suppose you'll tell us about the angels guarding the entrance to the Garden of Eden, so that none of us wander back there.

The only thing more annoying is those people who will talk about the "talents" in Matt. 25:14-30 as a metaphor for our abilities, even after admitting that talent is just a unit of weight.

Re:Terminology, people!

[syousef]

No cause then the RIAA would have you in jail for having anything to do with it!