Posted on 06/26/2016 6:48:55 AM PDT by BenLurkin
It happened about 3.9 billion light years from Earth in the direction of the Draco constellation, and was spotted using high-energy X-ray data from NASA's public archives.
The black hole, with a mass a few million times larger than the sun, gorged on the star at a rate 100 times greater than a theoretical maximum known as the Eddington limit.
The majority of supermassive black holes are dormant, meaning they are not actively consuming matter.
But occasionally a star drifts too close to a dormant black hole and a 'tidal disruption event' begins.
Authors of the new research say their findings could solve the mystery of how the largest black holes in the universe came to grow to such huge sizes.
The study's lead author Erin Kara, from the University of Maryland, said: "Most tidal disruption events don't emit much in the high-energy X-ray band.
"But there have been at least three known events that have, and this is the first and only such event that has been caught at its peak."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.sky.com ...
Isaac Newton shares some blame for inventing gravity.
Just like the federal government, and any other bureaucracy, given the chance.
Mark
What a great pair of songs those are!
Mark
The majority of supermassive black holes are dormant, meaning they are not actively consuming matter.
Tosh, after reading this statement I wonder about the
authors.
Black holes are never dormant. They may clear the space
around themselves, but the gravity never stops.
Absolutely.
How do we know Black Holes sleep?
Yeah that’s right! Too bad that apple didn’t him in the head. Better yet if it had been a big rock. :-)
They say that no one knows what’s on the other side of a black hole and where and what would be on the other side. I think I know. You’d probably come out in the parking lot of some cheezy WalMart like department store in a run down neighborhood next to some old broad who is wearing Spandex pants, hair all done up in a horrible bee hive like style smoking a cigarette loading stuff into the trunk of a 1987 Cadillac Coupe de Ville and she’d be looking at you like “Where the f did you come from?’’ So much for the egg heads.
That may explain some of the people I’ve seen in Walmart parking lots.
LOL!
The black hole emits Z particles when it sleeps. You know, zzz...zzz...zzz
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