Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Voracious Black Hole Generates Most Powerful Explosion Known

I don't know what to make of this, but it sounds neat. Scientific American reports that
Astronomers have discovered the largest explosion in the universe — one that has endured for more than 100 million years and generated as much energy as hundreds of millions of gamma-ray bursts. The source of this mayhem? An apparently insatiable supermassive black hole. …

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory … images show two cavities, each some 650,000 light-years across, that were scoured out by jets of energy emanating from the black hole, which itself may be a billion times the mass of our sun.

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