Nom Nom Nom goes the black hole

[Dubh Aingeal]

Astronomers have observed a black hole shredding a star and sending a powerful beam of energy toward Earth. When it was first observed on March 28th by the Swift spacecraft, it was thought to be the implosion of an aging star, but is now believed to be the result of a star wandering too close to a black hole, imploding and converting 10% of the star's mass into gamma radiation. The energy burst is still visible by telescope more than two-and-a-half months later, the researchers report in the journal Science.

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I love stuff like this

[Troy Spiral (13)]

We've come a long way from the days when black holes were only theoretial predictions , totally unobserved and (generally) assumed to be just anomilies in the mathmatics that predicted this unseen (and impossible to see directly) phenomenon.

One of the key stories that first set me on the road to realizing the power of science is this Nostradamus-esqe like prediction that these "things" exist which are unobserved and of which we had zero proof of along with a slew of other predictions (such as gravitational lensing) that all "came true" with real accuracy, not in the muddled wishy-washy riddle-like could-mean-almost-anything style of traditional "predictions".