Tag: space

Black hole eats a star

Space is a hot topic these days.  Not even a full week has passed since spectacular lunar eclipse, and we already have more exciting news. Space.com reports an extremely rare event:

A powerful beam of energy has been spotted blasting out from the center of a massive black hole as it rips apart and devours a star in a rare sight that astronomers say likely happens only once every 100 million years, a new study finds.

This is pretty impressive!  They’ve also published a couple of artist impressions of what is going on.

Total lunar eclipse

If you are reading it minutes after I post, then don’t lose precious time – run outside and look at the Moon.  Today you have a rare opportunity to observe total lunar eclipse.  If you are, and you probably are, late, then consider the illustration below.  Since I don’t possess all the necessary skill and equipment to make a photograph, I turned to my mad drawing skills.

Feel free to reuse the image as you wish, and please ignore all the scientific inconsistencies – I am not much of an artist and I had limited time.  After all, space bodies involved in this phenomena are moving fast.

Interestingly, even Google search is tracking the movement of the shadow.

 

The known universe

I’ve shared and favorite’d this video before, but it’s worth another time.  Every time you get depressed or pissed off about something, every time someone gets to you, or you think something horrible happened, just watch this video.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U]

That’s the known universe for you.  And if you think about how small we are compared to our planet, and how small our planet compared to some other, and how small our galaxy compared to the other ones, and so on and so forth, and then think about your problem again – doesn’t it look tiny and beyond microscopic now?