After taking a 26-year nap, a waking black hole released a burst of X-rays that lit up astronomical observatories on June 15 — and it's still making a ruckus today.
Astronomers identified the revived black hole as an "X-ray nova" — a sudden increase in star luminosity — coming from a binary system in the constellation Cygnus. The outburst may have been caused by material falling into a black hole.
The burst was first caught by NASA's Swift satellite, and then by a Japanese experiment on the International Space Station, called Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI). [Black Hole Wakes Up With A Bang (Video)]
"Relative to the lifetime of space observatories, these black-hole eruptions are quite rare," Neil Gehrels, Swift's principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement. "So, when we see one of them flare up, we try to throw everything we have at it, monitoring across the spectrum, from radio waves to gamma-rays."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @12:33AM
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