Astronomical discovery, black hole feast

     While a student at a large University, I pride myself and my school in having the ability to take a variety of science related classes. One of which is astronomy. I enjoy learning about all aspects of science and try to stay as up to date as possible, so when a news story hit ScienceNews this week, I was intrigued.

     A black hole in a galaxy 1.8 billion light years away destroyed by sheer force of gravity, and has been eating at the remains of a star for over 10 years, a huge time gap from the average of less than 1 year for black holes to devour stars.

     The long meal can be attributed to a combination of factors. How massive the star is, at about 10 times the mass of our Sun according to the ESA’s XMM-Newton spacecraft and NASA’s Chandra and Swift satellites, as well as how gradual the sequence was of the star slowly moving towards the black holes reach of gravity, just getting within the threshold of gravity to slowly be reeled in and be devoured.

     It is truly astonishing how with such a relatively small budget, organizations like NASA and other space programs around the world continue to learn and discover the amazing things about the Universe and how it works.

     At 1.8 billion light years away, it can be very humbling to the public and scientific minds alike to take a step back and ponder how minuscule and small our life is in such a vast, ever expanding universe. So many questions left to be answered, with nowhere to go but to answer them.

-Wainam