Wednesday, April 03, 2013

Black hole wakes up and has a light snack

Black hole wakes up and has a light snack "Astronomers have watched as a black hole woke up from a decades-long slumber to feed on a low-mass object - either a brown dwarf or a giant planet - that strayed too close. A similar feeding event, albeit on a gas cloud, will soon happen at the black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way Galaxy.

The discovery in galaxy NGC 4845, 47 million light-years away, was made by ESA's INTEGRAL space observatory, with follow-up observations from ESA's XMM-Newton, NASA's Swift and Japan's MAXI X-ray monitor on the International Space Station."

There's just this animation on the page so I'm not sure what the instruments actually observed.

No comments: