The Ohio State Univerity reports:
COLUMBUS, Ohio: Astronomers have gotten the closest look yet at what happens when a black hole takes a bite out of a star—and the star lives to tell the tale.
We may think of black holes as swallowing entire stars—or any other object that wanders too close to their immense gravity. But sometimes, a star that is almost captured by a black hole escapes with only a portion of its mass torn off. Such was the case for a star some 650 million light years away toward Ursa Major, the constellation that contains the “Big Dipper”, where a supermassive black hole tore off a chunk of material from a star that got away.
Conventional wisdom suggests that black holes don’t consume whole stars all that often—maybe only once every 10,000-100,000 years, Kochanek said. But how often black holes tear off just a piece of a passing star is an open question.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 26 2014, @04:08PM
By definition, a black hole is something that nothing, not even light, can escape from. If this star escaped, then whatever it encountered was, by definition, not a black hole.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Sunday October 26 2014, @04:20PM
*Nothing can escape the event horizon. A bit of the star's gas can be pulled into a black hole without the entire star being destroyed, and the star can be gravitationally slingshotted away from the black hole.
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(Score: 2) by isostatic on Sunday October 26 2014, @06:18PM
And we know that a gravitational slingshot around a star, especially a black star, can lead to time travel.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 26 2014, @04:20PM
It didn't escape from a black hole as in it was inside the black hole and got out.
It escaped from a black hole as in it got near it and only part of it went into the black hole, while the majority of it went past it.
(Score: 1) by art guerrilla on Sunday October 26 2014, @08:24PM
that's comforting...
if i find myself skimming a black hole's event horizon, *which* of my partial mass should i arrange to be ripped from the main mass ? ? ?
(Score: 1) by boristhespider on Sunday October 26 2014, @08:37PM
Do you happen to be millions of kilometres wide and made primarily of hydrogen? If not the situations are probably not entirely comparable...
(Score: 3, Funny) by arslan on Sunday October 26 2014, @10:20PM
duh that's obvious.. the fatty bits of course!
(Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Monday October 27 2014, @02:11PM
Well another article on the front page says obesity is a leading reason for people to be disqualified from military service... so it seems this article may be the solution.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday October 27 2014, @02:45PM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification [wikipedia.org]
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by JeanCroix on Monday October 27 2014, @02:50PM
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 26 2014, @04:52PM
Congratulations! You just won today's "Opinionated jerk arguing from a position of gross ignorance" award!
What is it about comment forums that make wildly uneducated morons think they can see in two seconds a flaw that researchers trained for decades in a field somehow failed to spot?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 26 2014, @06:02PM
Experts often overlook the most obvious problems with stuff, especially when it has to do with work that they're personally invested in in some way.
Just look at the Debian project. It was the premiere Linux distribution for many, many years. The people working on it were some of the best. Yet they've made the horrible mistake of integrating systemd into Debian. Anyone with any sense sees the many insurmountable problems with systemd [boycottsystemd.org]. Yet here we have the Debian developers, who are supposedly experts, making an asinine decision that is destroying the project both on a technical level and a community level.
Listen to experts, but ALWAYS question everything they say.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Sunday October 26 2014, @07:06PM
Experts often overlook the most obvious problems with stuff, especially when it has to do with work that they're personally invested in in some way.
If some expert is "personally invested" in a black hole, it would seem that they would be theoretically worse off than our near-miss escaped star. Of course, it is much the same with systemd.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 26 2014, @10:09PM
If only so that everyone else can laugh at you.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by zeigerpuppy on Sunday October 26 2014, @05:02PM
A black hole is a star who tried to burn too bright, struck iron and found itself without the puff to keep its own mass away. In an instant it fell in upon itself, still massive but now hopelessly, infinitely dense. And in so doing takes on a new character as one of the most forceful processes in the universe. By its presence shocking and stirring the cosmic soup and bringing new stars to life.
As they fly past, they are drawn to her like any other mass but with some luck can sail past without entering her spirally, death dance.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday October 26 2014, @08:19PM
You didn't address his point (though earlier posters did).
If it is a black hole, then it has an event horizon. If something crosses the event horizon, it will not escape, except as Hawking radiation. But stars are not point masses. It's quite feasible for part of a star to cross the event horizon, and the rest not to. This will, in fact, increase the velocity of the star away from the black hole. (The star was following an orbit determined by the centroid of mass. The part that was moving slowest relative to the black hole would be the part nearest to the event horizon. Remove that and the new centroid of mass is now directed further away from the black hole.)
P.S.: I have my doubts about any calculations involving infinite density. You might want to rethink that part.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pnkwarhall on Sunday October 26 2014, @10:45PM
If this is the quality of the discussion we'll get related to "Science!" [soylentnews.org] articles on Soylent, I'd prefer less science-ey articles rather than more...
I for one wondered about the source of this statement:
Conventional wisdom suggests that black holes don’t consume whole stars all that often—maybe only once every 10,000-100,000 years
....which seemed pulled straight out of Kochanek's ass, as I don't see how even astrophysicists/astronomers, who barely have a clue about many things in the universe -- including number of black holes in existence -- could talk about the 'conventional wisdom' of the frequency of stars being eaten by black holes...
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven