I thought black holes swallowed everything, including energy and gas. So how is it that this black hole is responsible for an explosion with gas streaming away from it, and with so much gamma radiation?
It's swallowed around 300 million stars. But there are terrifically powerful, swirling magnetic field lines surrounding black holes, lines which channel highly energized gas around and away from the holes.
Read "The Elegant Universe", black holes actually are capable of emissions.
See: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5473323/
DUBLIN, Ireland - After 29 years of thinking about it, Stephen Hawking says he was wrong about black holes.
The renowned Cambridge University physicist formally presented a paper Wednesday arguing that black holes, the celestial vortexes formed from collapsed stars, preserve traces of objects swallowed up and eventually could spit bits out “in a mangled form.” Last week, in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp., he revealed he had changed his long-held thinking on black holes.
Hawking’s radical new theory caps his three-decade struggle to explain a paradox in scientific thinking: How can objects really “disappear” inside a black hole and leave no trace, as he long believed, when subatomic theory says matter can be transformed but never fully destroyed?
Hawking had previously insisted that black holes destroy all molecular fingerprints of their contents and emit only a generic form of radiation.
But on Wednesday at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation, Hawking presented mind-boggling new calculations that suggest black holes are able to cast out their contents — and that there’s only one way in and one way out.
It's an endangered species! We need to expand the ESA to include the universe! We are kiling space by all the junk we send up there!
Jesse works in mysterious ways.
If they did, there wouldn't be anything, would there?