Slashdot Mirror
A Supermassive Black Hole Has Been Devouring a Star For a Decade (usatoday.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from USA Today: A massive black hole devoured a star over a 10 year period, setting a new record for the longest space meal ever observed, according to new research. Researchers spotted the ravenous black hole with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Swift satellite as well as ESA's XMM-Newton, according to a statement from NASA. When objects like stars get too close to black holes, the intense gravity of the black hole can rip the star apart in what's called a tidal disruption event (TDE), according to NASA. While some of the debris from the star is flung forward, parts of it are pulled back and ingested by the black hole, where it heats up and emits an X-ray flare, NASA said in a statement. The tidal disruption event spotted by the trio of X-ray telescopes, is unlike anything researchers have ever seen, lasting ten times longer than any observed incident of star's death caused by a black hole, according to research published in Nature Astronomy Feb. 6. The black hole, dubbed XJ1500+0154, is located in a galaxy 1.8 billion light-years from Earth. Researchers first spotted it in 2005 and it reached peak brightness in 2008, according to the statement. According to NASA, researchers believe that the black hole may have consumed the most massive star ever completely torn apart during a TDE.
This is a valid source for science news? The reasons why am I still here on this site are waning....
Just try with no Javascript. Just a black hole :-)
I guess this puts NASA in my "no visit" list (unless I devise some program to extract the pics and -perhaps- some text from that)
"Zathras can never have anything nice."
This one felt like the old slashdot yet all the newbs here act like this one isn't news.... This used to be *exactly* what we would find here back in the glory days... when geeks were here.
Sounds to me like this 10yr observation shows that we are still quite small and perhaps microscopic to larger beings. We just witnessed a small droplet of fuel explode and due to relativity it took us 10 years to see what is likely something that was in the blink of an eye to a larger being.
My personal thought is we are small.... Floating on a bunch of dust particles which could be simply being blown away by some small force such was wind or some kind of explosion. Like bacteria on sand being kicked up by running through the beach.... Imagine if instead of being so primitive the small creatures we observed were intelligent? And similar to how we view bacteria in comparison to ourselves as quite basic and dumb, maybe these massive beings are exponentially more advanced and watching us through small microscopes trying to figure out why we are so "dumb" and primitive. We would experience time much more rapidly and appear to have short life cycles to "them". They would watch millions of generations of us come and go before having even the most basic of interpretation.
Anyways... at least as few real geeks probably still come here. Reply if you have something logical to add.
According to NASA, researchers believe that the black hole may have consumed the most massive star ever completely torn apart during a TDE.
That is a wild claim considering the limited observation perspective of the universe, timeline that humans have been able to observe such events and the length of timeline that we even knew black holes existed vs the estimated age of the universe.
For a decade, almost 2 billon years ago ... pretty heady stuff. I wonder what's happening now ?
The article and summary mention nothing about the real story here: What kind of shirt was the spokesman wearing when he made the announcement? We know from direct empirical evidence that this is more important than humanity landing on a comet, much less some black hole somewhere.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
a bigger fish!
...to Muse.
... as though millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror ... and were silenced over a ten year period ...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Stop playing with your food and eat it!
30+ replies and no "Yo Mamma" jokes?
It's almost like we're maturing. Almost.
You meant "midnight snack", didn't you? (See what I did there? Midnight...black hole. )
I mean, could it actually Starkiller Base?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Tough as shoe leather.
It took forever to chew through that thing.
At least it was better than those Trump steaks we ordered.
We ended up throwing them out.
we are all in motion, and don't get me started on black holes....