thewrongvine
The Evolved Panda Commandant
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For the first time, astronomers have witnessed the violent death of a star as it happened. But this star didn't die from natural causes; it died as a result of straying too close to a black hole, whose immense tidal forces tore the unfortunate star to shreds before eating the remains.
The accused supermassive black hole resides in the center of a galaxy some 3.9 billion light-years away in the constellation Draco.
This violent event was noticed on March 29 after NASA's Swift space telescope detected X-rays being generated in the center of a distant galaxy, a galaxy with a supermassive black hole in its core that has, until now, remained dormant. Astronomers initially assumed that the X-ray signal was the onset of a gamma-ray burst, but they were wrong.
A short video by NASA: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/...ml?icid=maing-grid7|main5|dl5|sec1_lnk1|89642
The accused supermassive black hole resides in the center of a galaxy some 3.9 billion light-years away in the constellation Draco.
This violent event was noticed on March 29 after NASA's Swift space telescope detected X-rays being generated in the center of a distant galaxy, a galaxy with a supermassive black hole in its core that has, until now, remained dormant. Astronomers initially assumed that the X-ray signal was the onset of a gamma-ray burst, but they were wrong.
A short video by NASA: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/...ml?icid=maing-grid7|main5|dl5|sec1_lnk1|89642
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