Friday, June 14, 2013

Bad day to be a Star!


Meet Cygnus X-1, a black hole 15 times bigger than the sun and her companion massive blue star. Believe it or not Cygnus X-1 is eating the blue star. As a result, the energy and light being absorbed forms an orange disc ring around the black hole. That energy is then sucked in by the empty pit of doom. The following action is very violent. The black hole expels incredibly powerful jet streams of pure radiation from the star energy that was absorbed. Astronomers used various telescopes to see this event. As you can see in the left image there is a red box. That's the area Cygnus inhabits, but there is nothing right? That's because, it can't be seen with a naked eye, with normal human vision. You need to use x ray vision like Superman to see the giants' heat signature. Plus, astronomers use all kinds of other special vision modes that see things our eyes wouldn't see, such as magnetic waves, sonar-sound, etc. Oh yeah, the Jet streams of radiation coming from the black hole can travel long distances and I'm talking about Millions of light years. Planets in the path of the jet stream will be vaporized instantly. Life in neighboring solar systems can also  be eradicated and their ashes as well. Imagine all that power, if it can be harnessed? I can only wonder the possibilities we could achieve. Anyway it's a bad day for a star because she gets eaten up and her leftovers, in a sense, get blasted across the galaxy. This star ain't the only one with a bad day though, because according to Chandra X-ray center run by NASA, Stephen Hawking lost a bet that he placed in 1974 that there was no black hole in Cygnus X-1. Sorry blue star and Sorry Stephan Hawking. 
More info at:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2011/cygx1/

No comments: