Black Hole BelchImage courtesy Andrew Levan, University of Warwick
An artist's rendering shows twin jets of high-energy gamma rays coming from a supermassive black hole—a re-creation of what scientists think happened when an actual black hole 3.8 billion light-years away consumed a star.
"The mass of the star fell into the black hole, but along the way it heated up and produced a burst of energy in the form of a powerful jet of radiation, [which] we were able to detect through space-based observatories," Joshua Bloom, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, told National Geographic News on June 16. |