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Milky Way Black Hole Could Reignite

Posted by kdawson on from the tinfoil-umbrellas-might-help dept.

sciencehabit sends us to Sciencemag.org for an account of a survey of nearby galaxies that points to the possibility that once-quiescent galactic nuclei could wake up and become active again. If the Milky Way's dormant black hole should become active, it could be bad news for life on Earth (and elsewhere in the neighborhood). The paper (PDF) is up on the arXiv.

3 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Eye muss bee knew hear by sm62704 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Darn, and I never EVER rtfa, but the summary made it necessary. So for my fellow slashdotters who hate to RTFA, what they mean by "reignite" is to turn into a quasar. The way the black hole could turn into a quasar is for the galaxy to collide with another galaxy.

    I don't think we have anything to worry about. Nothing to see here (and if it happened, nobody to see it)

    --
    mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
    1. Re:Eye muss bee knew hear by Dan+East · · Score: 5, Informative

      "The way the black hole could turn into a quasar is for the galaxy to collide with another galaxy."

      That's not what the article says:
      It's not understood what is causing the black holes to become newly active, because in most cases there is no evidence of collisions or mergers.

      --
      Better known as 318230.
  2. No evidence for "re-ignition" by random+coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Quick summary of TFA: Scientists observe that the black holes at the center of galaxies were Quasars on far away galaxies. The one at the center of the Milky Way and other nerby galaxies were observed to not be Quasars. So they theorised that the black holes initially are quasars after galaxy formation, and they run out of fuel. New observations show that nearby galaxies do in fact have quasars. A scientist conjectured that it re-ignited. Better conjecture may be that the fuel source of those blackhole-quasars is more variable than previously thought.