Supermassive Black Hole Is Living Oxymoron - http://clapway.com/2015/08/12/super-massive-black-hole-099/

As it stands today, the universe is brimming with phenomena we’ve never seen before. Some of them reveal mind-boggling contradictions in our own presumed understanding of the cosmos. Recently, researchers at the University of Michigan found such a cosmic paradox.

BLACK HOLE, COLORFUL PROMISES

The smallest supermassive black hole ever detected was just catalogued by astronomers. At the center of a dwarf disk galaxy known as RGG 118, the odd hole in the cosmos is 340 million light years away from Earth, and will likely help us understand how black holes evolve in conjunction with their host galaxies since first joining the universe over 13 billion years ago.

“Black holes come in several different varieties,” wrote The Christian Science Monitor’s Noelle Swan. “The smallest kind, called a primordial black hole, is the size of a single atom, but it contains the mass of a large mountain. The most widely understood black holes are known as stellar black holes and can contain 20 times the mass of the sun within a ball of space with a diameter of about 10 miles.”

BLACK HOLE RGG 118 IN CONTEXT

However, Ms. Swan reminds us that a supermassive black hole can be big enough to swallow our entire solar system whole. So, despite this latest black hole being relatively small, its cosmic portent is certainly nonetheless maximal. Astronomers estimate RGG 118 to be roughly 50,000 times the mass of our own Sun. This is still 100 times less massive than the supermassive black hole lying at the center of our Milky Way, and 200,000 times smaller than the largest black hole yet catalogued, reported the .

This little devil might make big epistemic waves for the astronomical community.

HOW DO BLACK HOLES FORM WITH THEIR HOST GALAXY?

“These little galaxies can serve as analogues to galaxies in the earlier universe,” remarked Vivienne Baldassare, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and co-author of the study, in a recent press release.

“For galaxies like our Milky Way, we don’t know what it was like in its youth,” continued Baldassare, “[b]y studying how galaxies like this one are growing and feeding their black holes and how the two are influencing each other, we could gain a better understanding of how galaxies were forming in the early universe.”

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Supermassive Black Hole Is Living Oxymoron

Chandra Catches Pulsar Viciously Beat Massive Star B1259 - http://clapway.com/2015/07/25/chandra-catches-pulsar-viciously-beat-massive-star-b1259-567/

If you’ve never been in a street fight, and boxing is too technical to follow, then before you sprint to your nearest dojo, consider that all the punches delivered in the history of humanity are to what a pulsar travelling at a good chunk of light speed just did to a disk of matter orbiting a giant star. Bruce Lee said to kick to the moon, but Chandra just captured this pulsar just punting the equivalent of a planet into interstellar space.

CHANDRA HAS THE BEST SEAT IN THE HOUSE

Astronomers using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory orbiting the Earth witnessed the gigantic star called B1259 take this merciless beating in its home constellation Crux, also known as the Southern Cross. The punchee, B1259, is actually 30 times the mass of our Sun, and rotates at speeds so inconceivable that it actually bulges out at its sides. The puncher is a pulsar, i.e. an immensely dense mass of neutronium – the remains of an ancient star which, judging by how much is left of the pulsar, must have been even larger than its current punching bag.

I say punching bag because this mad pulsar actually forms a binary system with the star in an elliptical orbit of such high velocity that it punches right through the star’s extraneous disk every 3.5 years or so.

AFTERMATH’S HUMANITY

Astronomers observed the aftermath of this recent violence solemnly announced that the effected matter was hit with such magnificent force that what’s left of it has been expelled into interstellar space at 15 percent light speed (over 20 million miles per hour!).

Oleg Kargaltsev , Assistant Professor of Physics at George Washington University in Washington D.C. opined that “[a]fter this clump of stellar material was knocked out, the pulsar’s wind appears to have accelerated it, almost as if it had a rocket attached.”

His colleague, Jeremy Hare, added that “[t]his just shows how powerful the wind blasting off a pulsar can be…[t]he pulsar’s wind is so strong that it could ultimately eviscerate the entire disk around its companion star over time,” making what’s likely the most megalithic and apt use of the verb in the history of the English language.”

CHANDRA’S BEGINNINGS

Years before it exploded, the Columbia space shuttle installed the Chandra X-ray telescope in orbit in the year 1999. Once released, the scope boosted itself up into a particularly flashy elliptical orbit of its own, beyond Earth’s outermost charged-particle rings. This enabled Chandra to help us ogle the most heated spaces in the universe by virtue of its superlative X-ray tech.

It will be another 41 months before the next slug fest begins, so until then feel free to peruse this Astrophysical Journal at your leisure, ladies and gents.

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Chandra Catches Pulsar Viciously Beat Massive Star B1259