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."
Original Submission
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2015, @10:57PM
Mmmm, Yvette Mimeux....
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday July 04 2015, @11:11PM
You need to edit my story that you just accepted. Its just one, very unfortunate word. :-/
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @02:49AM
Get help, man.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday July 05 2015, @03:24AM
spellswell and lookup from working software.
butt eye nevar acthoolee youse thum.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by StupendousMan on Saturday July 04 2015, @11:22PM
I took images of the system with our university's 12-inch telescope over one night during the outburst, and made a movie showing the optical variations over about 5 hours. The fact that you can _see_ the changes in the star's light with your eyes in a movie like this is very unusual for a variable star in the optical.
http://spiff.rit.edu/richmond/ritobs/jun23_2015/jun23_2015.html [rit.edu]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @12:33AM
nom nom nom...
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday July 05 2015, @09:49AM
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?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @12:12AM
that's all i got