Star Wars Addiction

December 18, 2007

"That's No Galaxy..."

WASHINGTON ? The latest act of senseless violence caught on tape is cosmic in scope: A black hole in a "death star galaxy" blasting a neighboring galaxy with a deadly jet of radiation and energy.

The larger galaxy has a multi-digit name but is called the "death star galaxy" by one of the researchers who discovered the galactic bullying, Daniel Evans of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

A fleet of space and ground telescopes have captured images of this cosmic violence, which people have never witnessed before, according to a new study released Monday by NASA.

"It's like a bully, a black-hole bully punching the nose of a passing galaxy," said astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, who wasn't involved in the research.

The telescope images show the bully galaxy shooting a stream of deadly radiation particles into the lower section of the other galaxy, which is about one-tenth its size. Both are about 8.2 billion trillion miles from here, orbiting each other.

"A truly extraordinary act of violence," Evans said. "The jet violently slams into that lower half of the neighboring galaxy after which the jet dramatically twists and bends."

Check out the full article over at AZStarnet.com


	DarthDan December 18, 2007 Comment 1 "I felt a great disturbance in the Force...as if tens of millions of stars cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced." Angyll December 18, 2007 Comment 2 -dabs eyes for the loss of light in the universe- Kupcake December 18, 2007 Comment 3 I read about this this morning on foxnews.com. Interesting......... CAndyman December 18, 2007 Comment 4 I saw part of that article too, and here's what I don't understand... What makes a Blackhole dark is that the gravitaional singularity's mass shadow creates a pull requireing matter to go much faster than the speed of light to reach the critical escape velocity needed to obtain orbit or leave the event horizon. So either this "energy" is matter that is capable of exceeding, at least relatively so, the speed of light which has been previously set as an absolute limit for particle travel OR the energy is not in fact being emitted from within the singularity but in fact from outside of the event horizon merely as an eddie-effect of energy-matter collisions of cosmic bodies that have not yet been completely captured by the gravitational pull. Either way I'm haveing trouble wrapping my head around it. Darth Pyriel December 19, 2007 Comment 5 Rarely we are reminded of how small and insignifigant we are.This is definantly one of these moments.Imagine if we were in the path of this radiation? Or even a solar flare from our own sun? Kupcake December 19, 2007 Comment 6 QUOTE(CAndyman @ December 18 2007, 02:29 PM) I saw part of that article too, and here's what I don't understand... What makes a Blackhole dark is that the gravitaional singularity's mass shadow creates a pull requireing matter to go much faster than the speed of light to reach the critical escape velocity needed to obtain orbit or leave the event horizon. So either this "energy" is matter that is capable of exceeding, at least relatively so, the speed of light which has been previously set as an absolute limit for particle travel OR the energy is not in fact being emitted from within the singularity but in fact from outside of the event horizon merely as an eddie-effect of energy-matter collisions of cosmic bodies that have not yet been completely captured by the gravitational pull. Either way I'm haveing trouble wrapping my head around it. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I'll get Ethanos to come post an answer for you. Hehe, he wants to be an Astronomy Professor when he grows up.