Well this is interesting, in a rather bleak way:
New Kind of Space Explosion Reveals the Birth of a Black Hole:A supernova-like explosion dubbed “the Camel” appears to be the result of a newborn black hole eating a star from the inside out.
The explosion, known as a “transition,” is bluer than an ordinary supernova
Well of course it’s “bluer” than an “ordinary” supernova: the destructive capabilities of such an event — known as a transient — are absolute. The working theory appears to be that the event is “a “failed supernova” scenario, where a black hole quite literally eats a star from the inside out.”
Yeah, I’d say that sums it up quite simply.
It also describes the state of the country currently.
A Congress riven along party lines approved a landmark $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill Wednesday, as President Joe Biden and Democrats claimed a triumph on a bill that marshals the government’s spending might against twin pandemic and economic crises that have upended a nation…For Biden and Democrats, the bill is essentially a canvas on which they’ve painted their core beliefs — that government programs can be a benefit, not a bane, to millions of people and that spending huge sums on such efforts can be a cure, not a curse. The measure so closely tracks Democrats’ priorities that several rank it with the top achievements of their careers. - NPR
Politicians dreams, like those of astrophysicists, appear to depend on a working understanding of infinity. But let’s get back to the recent space explosion – apparently not all “transitions” are equal.
They quickly get bright, then fade fast. They’re also hot, which makes them look blue. But these “fast blue optical transients” are not identical.
A fine specimen of one of those “fast blue optical transients”
“The explosion itself and the sort of zombie afterlife behavior, those are quite similar,” said Anna Ho, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley…
The events all appear to be some sort of explosion from a star that collides with nearby gas and dust. “But the collision stage where you’re seeing the explosion collide with ambient material, that has shown some variation in the amount of material lying around and the speed in which the shock wave from the explosion is plowing through the material.”
Example of some of the ambient material plowing through our material with shocking speed
The process begins when a massive star…reaches the end of its life and exhausts its fuel. Its core then collapses, beginning what would normally be a regular supernova, where infalling material rebounds back out, leaving behind a dense object called a neutron star.
But in cases like the (current transient) “something unusual happens in the process to core collapse…what we claim is that instead of collapsing to a neutron star, it collapsed straight into a black hole, and most of the star fell into the black hole.
And it all happened so quickly the Democrats hardly noticed, as they were all so blinded by our light.
Oh my God! It’s filled with stars!
But what the hell, you say, this black hole doesn’t send mean tweets so we’re all good, right?
Joey: putting the “Dem” in Dementia since who knows when
P.S. The fact that this current “transition” has been named “the Camel” is purely koincidental. Then again, there is no such thing as a koincidence.
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