Thursday, January 10, 2013

Perspective..


Here's a chilling photo for you, it shows (amazingly) the super massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy and the white stuff is matter (planets, stars etc.) being sucked in and mashed.

We tend to think of our cosmic backyard in the universe as safe, unchanging perhaps boring even, but as this picture shows even our own neighbourhood we have some pretty scary stuff going on. Once black holes start digesting stuff then you tend to end up with chaos, beams of matter blasting out at nearly the speed of light, bursts of high energy X- and gamma rays, and pretty much annihilation for anything with a few hundred light years. Fortunately for us our galaxy is a hundred thousand light years wide and we're located out in the sticks, so we're safe... for now.

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