Waspie_Dwarf Posted June 15, 2013 #1 Share Posted June 15, 2013 NASA-Led Study Explains Decades of Black Hole Observations A new study by astronomers at NASA, Johns Hopkins University and the Rochester Institute of Technology confirms long-held suspicions about how stellar-mass black holes produce their highest-energy light."Our work traces the complex motions, particle interactions and turbulent magnetic fields in billion-degree gas on the threshold of a black hole, one of the most extreme physical environments in the universe," said lead researcher Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Read more... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Waspie_Dwarf Posted June 15, 2013 Author #2 Share Posted June 15, 2013 Peer into a Simulated Stellar-mass Black Hole This animation of supercomputer data takes you to the inner zone of the accretion disk of a stellar-mass black hole. Gas heated to 20 million degrees Fahrenheit as it spirals toward the black hole glows in low-energy, or soft, X-rays. Just before the gas plunges to the center, its orbital motion is approaching the speed of light. X-rays up to hundreds of times more powerful ('harder') than those in the disk arise from the corona, a region of tenuous and much hotter gas around the disk. Coronal temperatures reach billions of degrees. The event horizon is the boundary where all trajectories, including those of light, must go inward. Nothing, not even light, can pass outward across the event horizon and escape the black hole.Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight CenterMusic: 'Lost in Space' by Lars Leonhard, courtesy of the artistSource: NASA - Multimedia Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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