Rare Sight: Giant Black Hole Devours Star, Fires Beams at Earth
 

A powerful beam of energy has been spotted blasting out from the center of a massive black hole as it rips apart and devours a star in a rare sight that astronomers say likely happens only once every 100 million years, a new study finds.
When a NASA satellite first detected the intensely bright flash deep in the cosmos, astronomers initially thought it was a powerful burst of gamma rays from a collapsing star, one of the most powerful types of explosions in the universe. But, when the tremendous amount of energy could still be seen months later, they realized something more mysterious was going on.
"This is a really, really unusual event," study co-author Joshua Bloom,assistant professor of Astronomy at University of California, Berkeley, told SPACE.com. "It's now about two-and-a-half months old, and the fact that it just continues on and is only fading very slowly is the one really big piece of evidence that tells us this is not an ordinary gamma-ray burst." [Photos: Black Holes of the Universe]


NASA’s Swift Gamma Burst Mission spacecraft first detected the gamma-ray flash, called Sw 1644+57, within the constellation Draco, at the center of a galaxy nearly 4 billion light-years away.


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Some great pics and more at the link given :salute:

Check it out, it looks like the American budget deficit....in space. :D

http://www.universetoday.com/wp-cont...e1-580x429.jpg

@ Torplexed:
there are subtle differences, the deficit is not fading very slowly and it's not 2 and a half months old :haha:
Oh, and it's not an unusual event.

It's been two-and-a-half months since they first saw it. How far away is it, and how many hundreds, thousands or millions of years ago did it actually happen?

Who says you can't witness the past? 3.8 billion light years from Earth, so we're looking at ancient intergalactic history here. Makes you wonder how many stars it's gobbled since.:hmmm:

And how many inhabited planets. I think we're safe, though.

Well the nearest black hole is 1600 lightyears from here. So I don't think we should worry about the one from the article.

Wrong. The nearest ones to me are my college-age kids checking accounts, the event horizon is parked right next to my retirement account, inching closer by the minute.....