Black Holes' Vast Power Is Documented

NY TIMES ^ | February 19, 2004 | JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

[HiTech RedNeck]

After analysis, an international team of scientists concluded that the telescopes had witnessed the overpowering gravity of a black hole as it tore apart a star and gobbled up a hearty share of its gaseous mass.

Why didn't it swallow the whole star? Not hungry enough?

[neverdem]

PING

[general_re]

Dirty atheists at work ;)

[js1138]

Another time, another place.

[Mad_Tom_Rackham]

Maybe it's on the Atkins plan.

[general_re]

It was inevitable...

[js1138]

I like the "Kennedy at the Berlin Wall". Interesting that The Onion would make fun of one of Kennedy's better moments. Obviously provocative statements like his alienated our allies and made the world less safe.

[general_re]

Spitting on icons is more or less their raison d'etre ;)

[neverdem]

LOL, thanks for the laughing link.

[Clock King]

Maybe it's on the Atkins plan.

Would that be the low-carb(on) diet?

The astronomers gave assurances that the Sun is far enough away from a suspected black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy to be well out of danger.

Well, gee, I'm relieved! I was worried for a while there!

[RightWingAtheist]

[Constantine XIII]

I've read a long time ago (Scientific American, I think) that scientists as a group are about as religious as the rest of the population. On the other hand, if you look at college religion professors and students, only about 10% are religious.

I thought that was funny. :p

[Constantine XIII]

The Phenomenon of Red Shift

Even today, the stars and galaxies continue to fly apart. This produces a phenomenon called red shift. The further away a celestial object is, the more it appears to astronomers on Earth to be shifted toward the red end of the spectrum.

Red shift shows increasing totalitarian domination of the outer reaches of the universe. Write your congressman!

Courtesy of "Science Made Stupid"

http://www.besse.at/sms/smsintro.html

[general_re]

Red shift shows increasing totalitarian domination of the outer reaches of the universe.

I like it. ;)

I guess I should explain - last night, just before js and I posted here, there was a vanity thread (which was pretty quickly pulled) that argued that the super-duper top-secret real mission of NASA was actually to advance atheism and Marxism by making it really really hard for people to believe in God. So after a bit of appropriate mocking, that thread got yanked, and I just happened to see this thread right there afterwards. So that's the reason you got the strange comments ;)

[Constantine XIII]

I never did understand how people can think NASA, of all the various government agencies, is the most evil. :-P

[Doctor Stochastic]

....brilliant flare of X-rays from the heart of a distant galaxy, followed by a fading afterglow.

A bit like the bedroom scene in "To Catch a Thief."

[jellybean]

The black hole, in effect, reached out and squeezed and stretched the star until it disintegrated.

Kind of what happens to people who get too close to Bill and Hillary!.

[neverdem]

LOL

[farmfriend]

These stories always make it seem like they are really close together. I guess they are in the cosmic sense.