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Intermediate-Mass Black Hole Found In Omega Centauri
esocid sends us to the European Space Agency's site for news of a new discovery that appears to resolve the long-standing mystery surrounding Omega Centauri, the largest and brightest globular cluster in the sky. The object is 17,000 light-years distant and is located just above the plane of the Milky Way. Seen from a dark rural area in the southern hemisphere, Omega Centauri appears almost as large as the full moon. What the researchers discovered is a black hole of 40,000 solar masses in the cluster's center. From the press release: "Images obtained with the Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and data obtained by the GMOS spectrograph on the Gemini South telescope in Chile show that Omega Centauri appears to harbor an elusive intermediate-mass black hole in its center... Exactly how Omega Centauri should be classified has always been a contentious topic. It was first listed in Ptolemy's catalog nearly two thousand years ago as a single star. Edmond Halley reported it as a nebula in 1677. In the 1830s the English astronomer John Herschel was the first to recognize it as a globular cluster. Now, more than a century later, this new result suggests Omega Centauri is not a globular cluster at all, but a dwarf galaxy stripped of its outer stars. According to scientists, these intermediate-mass black holes could turn out to be baby supermassive black holes."
Why do my "reply to this" links now have an awful black button around them??? Oh god my eyes!!!
+9, old school
+15, hates any change to his beloved slashdot
moox. for a new generation.
I don't like the huge buttons, or all the wasted white space on the left. It'll be fine on my home PC with the widescreen monitor, but at work on the 1280x1024....
The boxes around each post and its children is helpful in staying within a parent's post; before I had to place my mouse on the left of a post and scroll up till I found it's parent.
Can we use this to generate some new blackhole memes? Stuff like:
Blackholes are like opinions, everyone has one and they suck!
or
You can have blackhole when you pry it from my cold dead fingers!
Not askin for a handout here, just a blackhole.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
"Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 2.0)." Oh please. OK, here's some random garbage to satisfy the input nanny. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Mare eat oats; does eat oats; little lambs eat ivy. A kid will eat ivy too (wouldn't you?). Xenu (also Xemu), pronounced
If you figure out how to override it, please share the solution with me, or make a firefox plug in. This is really awful. Yikes.
moox. for a new generation.
I feel it tuggging my leg now.
No, thats my dog I forgot feed breakfast.
here you go, the web developer extension. enjoy.
In Soviet Russia, baby supermassive black holes turn out to be you!
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