Monster black hole devours dead star:
[Via Bad Astronomy]
Deep in the heart of a globular cluster orbiting an elliptical galaxy, it looks very much as if a massive black hole is in the process of tearing apart and devouring the remnant of an old star. And how do we know we’re witnessing this violent stellar demise? Black holes are messy eaters.
The discovery comes from the Chandra Observatory, a telescope in space designed to detect X-rays. This high-energy form of light can only be generated by violent events, things like exploding stars, strong magnetic fields, or extremely hot objects. Astronomers (including Jimmy Irwin, an old friend I went to grad school with!) using Chandra detected an unusually bright source of X-rays coming from a globular cluster — a tightly packed collection of stars — belonging to NGC 1399, a galaxy 65 million light years away. In the picture above (a combination of Chandra X-ray images and optical images from the huge Magellan telescopes in Chile), the galaxy is the bright blob on the right, and the new object — called a ULX for Ultra Luminous X-ray source — is marked with the red lines.
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Since Disney is remaking The Black Hole, it would be great if they used this sort of idea. Avatar has shown us a water moon that revolved around a gaseous giant. It demonstrated that we can create any world we can visualize. It would be pretty awesome to have a black hole eating up another star.
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