Flares erupt from our galaxy's heart, the ISS gets an extreme home makeover, fires blaze near LA, and more in this week's best space photos....
Two separate telescopes in Chile picked up the same black hole flare recently, allowing them to see for the first time what it looks like when superheated gas orbits the black hole's event horizon as it is being devoured. The black hole in question is the Milky Way's own supermassive Sagittarius A*, with a mass of about four million times that of the Sun. In the artist's renderings on the right, you can see what the gas would look like as it revolved around the black hole. On the left, you can see what astronomers actually observed: a flare...
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The Christmas ads are already hitting the airwaves, so it's only fair that we bring you this LED circuit board menorah way to early too. There are few surprises with this 5.5-inch tall by 9-inch wide menorah, other than the geek factor that comes alongside celebrating eight crazy nights with a motherboard and some LEDs. For $25 you too can celebrate Hanukkah 2.0. [Fred Flares via Technabob]...
Economist.com took a pass on the free-content phenomenon first time around - now, just as flares and yo-yos came back in to fashion, the publisher sees pay walls regaining popularity in an advertising downturn. The news mag's site already charges for stories over a year old and, publisher Paul Rossi told our Future Of Business Media conference, that could be just the right model for a looming recession: "The growth in online advertising is slowing. Is this the return to paid content online, because advertising becomes less a driver for the business? It will be be interesting to see if...
In a paper in the current issue of the journal Nature, author Alberto J. Castro-Tirado explains witnessing a bizarre and rare celestial event. Most celestial bodies exert a magnetic field, however a magnetar’s is exponentially stronger than that of our own. "A magnetar would wipe the information from all credit cards on Earth from a distance halfway to the Moon," says co-author Antonio de Ugarte Postigo. "Magnetars remain quiescent for decades. It is likely that there is a considerable population in the Milky Way, although only about a dozen have been identified." Astronomers witnessed an object emit a gamma-ray...
A team of Japanese astronomers using ESA’s XMM-Newton, along with NASA and Japanese X-ray satellites, has discovered that our galaxy’s central black hole let loose a powerful flare three centuries ago. The finding helped resolve a long-standing mystery: why is the Milky Way’s black hole so quiescent? The black hole, known as Sagittarius A-star (A*), is a certified monster, containing about 4 million times the mass of our Sun. Yet the energy radiated from its surroundings is thousands of millions of times weaker than the radiation emitted from central black holes in other galaxies."We have wondered why the Milky...
