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Black Hole 'Wakes Up' After 26-Year Slumber

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

janrinok writes:

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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Original Submission

• Re:Soylent admins please check you emailRe:Soylent admins please check you email (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @02:49AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @02:49AM (#205182)

  Get help, man.

  Parent

  Starting Score:	0		points
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  Insightful=1, Funny=1, Total=2
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• I used to write spellcheckers(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday July 05 2015, @03:24AM

  by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Sunday July 05 2015, @03:24AM (#205186) Homepage Journal

  spellswell and lookup from working software.

  butt eye nevar acthoolee youse thum.

  --
  Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]

  Parent