Black Hole Caught Swallowing Star For The First Time

Black hole's have been thuggin' stars & other space debris for as long as the universe has been in existence. For decades these transgressions have gone unnoticed to Earth's busy body's at NASA. For the first time however Astronomers caught one swallowing a star minding its own business. NASA released the above animation of this rare event showing how the star fell victim to the black hole's greedy ass. Up to this point we've only been witnessed to the aftermath of such illicit galactic going's on, but now with NASA's Swift satellite we nosy earthlings were able to detect "high-energy flares coming from a new source" back in March. The culprit turned out to be Swift J1644+57, a previously dormant black hole located in the Draco constellation, just about 4 million light years away from Earth. NASA scientists believe J maybe twice the size of the black hole that exists in our galaxy. Large black holes can be found at the center of virtually all large galaxies (which could give creedence to mine & other mad scientist's theory of black holes being a "stargate" kinda situation to other galaxies & maybe even other dimensions. Oooo nerd goosebumps.) and can be millions to billions of times the mass of our sun. These motherfuckers have the sinister ability to tear apart anything that crosses its path icegrill or no. You'd be able to tell when a black hole just pulled a jack move on somebody by a bright flare of ultraviolet gamma & x-rays, which can literally though allegedly last for years as the star is slowly eaten. "It was nothing like we expected for a gamma-ray burst," said Ashley Zauderer, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who helped co-author one of two studies on the event.

This is how scientists believed it all went down.

The theory they are working with is that the unlucky star must have strayed too close to the supermassive black hole, which is approximately twice the mass of the four-million-solar-mass supermassive black hole residing in the center of the Milky Way.

Discovery News said the tidal shear close to the black hole's event horizon is so powerful, the star's structure would have warped dramatically. Very quickly, the stellar plasma will have streamed around the spinning black hole, forming a superheated disk of plasma. The plasma closest to the black hole then got pulled into the event horizon, accelerating as it did so, according to Discovery News.

The discovery article stated that the rapid acceleration and complex magnetic fields nearest to the black hole then funneled the matter into the event horizon. However, some of the matter escaped as jets, blasting into space at relativistic speeds (exceeding 90 percent the speed of light) from the black hole's spin axis.

One of those jets was pointed directly at the Swift satellite that caught the powerful X-rays created right at the base of the jet. Powerful radio waves were also detected as the relativistic jet slammed into the interstellar medium surrounding the black hole. Eat your heart out CSI: (insert random city here). The video above looks awesome though. Props to International Business Times.

Huge Dark Planet Discovered Not Far From Earth

Black Holes are no longer the premier astronomical objects in the universe that have something against reflecting light. News broke a few hours ago that astronomers have discovered a big honking, Jupiter-sized gas giant they've named TrES-2b a mere 750 light years away from Earth. Which is like right down the block considering our sun basically lives in the same building as us being 93 million miles away from Earth (scope people, scope). So why is this guy like a black hole? Well TrES is the darkest exoplanet that astronomers have ever happened upon. NASA's Kepler spacecraft suggest TrES reflects less than one percent of the sunlight thats hits it. This is crazy because the star TrES orbits is only 3 million miles away from it (remember: ours is only 93 million miles away from us). TrES-2b's temperature averages out at around 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (gotdamn!) Space guys say there's no indication that the planet's retardedly hot atmosphere being riddled with light-absorbing chemicals isn't the direct reason why it fails to reflect serious amounts of light, they don't really know what's responsible for TrES being exceptionally dark. Princeton University professor David Spiegel who's paper is also responsible for revealing the planet's existence says that "However, it's not completely pitch black. It's so hot that it emits a faint red glow, much like a burning ember or the coils on an electric stove." So no, we can't live there. The chances of life existing there is very, very impossible. So don't get any ideas (i'm looking at you Richard Branson & George Lucas). Spotted at PC Magazine.