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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday July 04 2015, @10:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-a-short-nap dept.

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."


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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday July 05 2015, @09:49AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday July 05 2015, @09:49AM (#205242) Journal

    Kudos to make it work without JavaScript.

    Anyway, I notice lots of light points appearing and disappearing again (I don't mean the obvious noise, but actually bright points). Are they all satellites? If so, the sky is much more crowded than I thought. Otherwise, what are they?

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