Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Uh oh Black Hole?

I've got some scary news guys!  Astronomers think they have seen a black hole.
     X-ray observations suggest the supernova, called SN 1979C, is a black hole in the making, a team of U.S. and European astronomers said.
"If our interpretation is correct, this is the nearest example where the birth of a black hole has been observed," Daniel Patnaude of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, who helped lead the study, said in a statement.
Amateur astronomer Gus Johnson of Maryland spotted the supernova in 1979 at the edge of a galaxy called M100 and astronomers have been peering at it since. Light and X-rays from the collapse have taken 50 million years to travel to Earth at the speed of light -- 186,000 miles a second, or about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km) a year.
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton and the German ROSAT observatory have seen that it emits a steady source of bright X-rays.
Analysis of the X-rays support the idea that the object is a black hole and that it is either being fed by material falling back from an initial supernova, or perhaps from a twin star, the astronomers said.
Scientists believe black holes can be formed in a number of ways -- in this case by a star about 20 times the mass of our Sun going supernova and then collapsing into an object so dense that it sucks surrounding material into its core.

If this is true, then what if it kills all of us. And the coolest(or worst) part is that we won't even be able to see it because light gets sucked into black holes!

12 comments:

  1. Possible, yet it proves that we should live our life everyday like the last one and stop worrying about possible death upcoming!

    ReplyDelete
  2. i guess we gotta just live life to the fullest!

    ReplyDelete
  3. i agree with the guy above... xrays are cool

    ReplyDelete
  4. isn't this the black hole that's speculated to have formed a mere 30ish years ago? that's pretty recent on an astrological time scale!

    ReplyDelete
  5. lets hope we don't creat one any time soon with our nice hydron collider

    ReplyDelete
  6. I doubt its going to kill us lol, if it will, we still have some time ^-^

    ReplyDelete
  7. It will probably happen on 2012. lol

    ReplyDelete
  8. Supernova death would be a death with style..oô

    ReplyDelete