Current Events

Black Holes

On March 28 astronomers got the first glimpse of of a dormant black hole become live. Scientists think that the explosion of a couple stars caused it to restart. If this black hole sucks in a star, it could stay live for another 1000 years. If this happened to the dormant black hole in the Milky Way were to start Earth could be in danger. However that is highly unlikely.

The black hole is sucking in a large amount of gas and jetting it out again. If the black hole in the milky way started, that is also what it would do, except that the jet of gas it is expelling would be 40 times stronger than the jet of gas the other galaxies would be.

However, this is not actually the first time this has ever been caught on camera. This was done at 3 other occasions but Nasa's Swift satellite caught it minutes after it happened, while on other occasions they caught it days or weeks later. Maybe that is because they are so far away. This one in fact is 3.8 billion light years away.

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