The process that makes black holes.
Armed with state-of-the-art supercomputer models, scientists have shown that colliding neutron stars can produce the energetic jet required for a gamma-ray burst. Earlier simulations demonstrated that mergers could make black holes.
Others had shown that the high-speed particle jets needed to make a gamma-ray burst would continue if placed in the swirling wreckage of a recent merger.
Now, the simulations reveal the middle step of the process--how the merging stars' magnetic field organizes itself into outwardly directed components capable of forming a jet.
The Damiana supercomputer at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics needed six weeks to reveal the details of a process that unfolds in just 35 thousandths of a second--less than the blink of an eye.
Black Hole Consumes a Super-Jupiter.
Astronomers using ESA's Integral and XMM-Newton space telescopes, NASA's Swift and the MAXI (Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image) instrument on the International Space Station have made the first detection of a substellar object being disrupted by a black hole.
The discovery was made in the 47 million-light-year-distant galaxy, NGC 4845, where a substellar object moving through space encountered the black hole.
During this encouter, debris becomes heated and emits a blast of X-ray radiation before fading away.
The object lies in the mass range of 14--30 Jupiter masses, corresponding to either a brown dwarf or a large gas planet.credit: ESA.
And... where is our place in the universe?
An amazing video of a 3D atlas of the Universe.
The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang.
Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world's most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History.
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