Free Republic

Periodically, these gravitational behemoths will devoir stars and other objects in their vicinity, releasing tremendous amounts of light and radiation. In October 2018, astronomers witnessed one such event when observing a black hole in a galaxy located 665 million light-years from Earth....another team from the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics noticed something unprecedented when they examined the same black hole three years later. As they explained in a recent study, the black hole was shining very brightly because it was ejecting...leftover material from the star at half the speed of light. [T]he team observed the outburst while revisiting data...

Before the Washington Nationals lost their final regular season game to the National League East champion Mets, general manager Mike Rizzo promised he wasn’t going to leave people twisting in the wind. Rizzo’s words, not mine. Maybe he thought Nats fans had been forced into doing the twist too long this season already. Monday morning Rizzo kept his promise—and how. He executed manager Matt Williams, just a year after Williams was named the National League’s Manager of the Year. The man who came into the season leading the prohibitive World Series favourites leaves it with his head in a guillotine...

Soyuz 2 launcher currently operates alongside the Soyuz-U (mainly used for launching the unmanned Progress Resupply Spacecraft to the International Space Station) and the Soyuz FG (primarily used for human flights with the Soyuz Spacecraft for missions to ISS), but according to Spaceflight 101, the Soyuz 2 will eventually replace the other vehicles once they are phased out. In fact, in October of 2014, the Soyuz 2 in 2014 had its first launch of a Progress cargo spacecraft. Other achievements were that the last two launches of the year were conducted without the aid of DM blocks – a derivative...