NASA Says Black Hole Devours Star
On March 28, 2011, the NASA Swift X-Ray Telescope recorded a three hour segment of a black hole, named J1644+57 consuming a star. This awesome video animation model recreates one model proposing what the entire event must look like, and is well worth a 25 second view.
I'm curious about how long it would take to drift into the gravitational field of a black hole, be consumed, and converted into gigantic x-ray jets, but haven't seen an estimate. Would this be millions of years condensed into this 25 seconds?
NASA's Website describes the scientific recordings, and how this animation model was created to represent a theory of the "bigger picture" of what scientists think has been happening.
Researchers Detail How A Distant Black Hole Devoured A Star08.24.11 On March 28, 2011, NASA's Swift detected intense X-ray flares thought to be caused by a black hole devouring a star. In one model, illustrated here, a sun-like star on an eccentric orbit plunges too close to its galaxy's central black hole. About half of the star's mass feeds an accretion disk around the black hole, which in turn powers a particle jet that beams radiation toward Earth.
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Black Hole Continued
Swift's X-Ray Telescope continues to record high-energy flares from Swift J1644+57 more than three months after the source's first appearance. Astronomers believe that this behavior represents the slow depletion of gas in an accretion disk around a supermassive black hole. ...
Images from Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical (white, purple) and X-Ray telescopes (yellow and red) were combined to make this view of Swift J1644+57. Evidence of the flares is seen only in the X-ray image, which is a 3.4-hour exposure taken on March 28, 2011.
Most galaxies, including our own, possess a central supersized black hole weighing millions of times the sun's mass. According to the new studies, the black hole in the galaxy hosting Swift J1644+57 may be twice the mass of the four-million-solar-mass black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy. As a star falls toward a black hole, it is ripped apart by intense tides. The gas is corralled into a disk that swirls around the black hole and becomes rapidly heated to temperatures of millions of degrees.
The innermost gas in the disk spirals toward the black hole, where rapid motion and magnetism create dual, oppositely directed "funnels" through which some particles may escape. Jets driving matter at velocities greater than 90 percent the speed of light form along the black hole's spin axis. In the case of Swift J1644+57, one of these jets happened to point straight at Earth.
Photo Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
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Astronomers Discover Planet Made of Diamond
And, in a second amazing Space story tonight, Ben Hirschler reports on a planet made up almost entirely of diamond, a highly concentrated form of carbon.
An exotic planet that seems to be made of diamond racing around a tiny star in our galactic backyard in an undated image courtesy of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.
By Ben Hirschler
Astronomers have spotted an exotic planet that seems to be made of diamond racing around a tiny star in our galactic backyard.
The new planet is far denser than any other known so far and consists largely of carbon. Because it is so dense, scientists calculate the carbon must be crystalline, so a large part of this strange world will effectively be diamond.
"The evolutionary history and amazing density of the planet all suggest it is comprised of carbon -- i.e. a massive diamond orbiting a neutron star every two hours in an orbit so tight it would fit inside our own Sun," said Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.
Lying 4,000 light years away, or around an eighth of the way toward the center of the Milky Way from the Earth, the planet is probably the remnant of a once-massive star that has lost its outer layers to the so-called pulsar star it orbits.
Pulsars are tiny, dead neutron stars that are only around 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) in diameter and spin hundreds of times a second, emitting beams of radiation.
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These extraordinary and beautiful creations astonish me and leave me in awe of the universe.
I can almost remember Albert Einstein's quote, that those who are deeply passionate about science and religion are united by the sense of awe and wonder about the magnitude of the universe.
But, like a lot of old songs I don't fully remember the words to, I know the feeling completely.
Also, NASA's science-art-modeling team is on a roll, is it not?
I have a more detailed article and video on how they have been making this series of mind-blowing images, that I'll try to post soon. It represents a significant advance in graphical representation of celestial bodies, you may have noticed recently.
And, as if to make sure we get the point!
Cheers.
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