A Supermassive Black Hole, Sent Screaming Through Space by a Galactic
Slingshot
God's Liquor Cabinet
If you find yourself one day piloting a starship around the universe, there are
certain combinations of words that you just don't want to hear from your
co-pilot. Somewhere around the top of that list would be "supermassive," "black
hole," and "moving at 3 million miles per hour." But that just happens to
describe the situation in the CID-42 system, where scientists have seen two
galaxies team up to slingshot a huge-ass black hole right the hell out into
space at an impossible speed.Keep in mind, a supermassive black
hole is millions or even billions of times more massive than the Sun, so the
forces required to fire one like a bullet are vast and unfathomable.
The phenomenon could only be detected based on evidence gleaned from the scene of the crash. The very nature of a black hole is that you can't possibly see it, not even if it's a foot in front of your face. Of course, if it's a foot in front of your face, you are already incredibly dead. That's arguably the good news -- if a nearby galaxy decides to do this to us, we won't even know to panic.
The phenomenon could only be detected based on evidence gleaned from the scene of the crash. The very nature of a black hole is that you can't possibly see it, not even if it's a foot in front of your face. Of course, if it's a foot in front of your face, you are already incredibly dead. That's arguably the good news -- if a nearby galaxy decides to do this to us, we won't even know to panic.
If anything is going to replenish the public's waning interest in space exploration, it's probably this: Below is a photo of Sagittarius B2, a huge cloud a few million times the mass of our sun, floating around near the center of our galaxy. Scientists have discovered that it's basically a giant river of raspberry-flavored rum.
No, really. Sagittarius B2 contains about 10 billion billion billion liters of alcohol. That's enough booze to get Galactus to make a pass at Ursa Major, but the cloud is also packed full of molecules called ethyl formate. This chemical, said to smell of rum, is the same chemical that gives raspberries their flavor.
Not only did God apparently decide to "Irish up" the Milky Way, but this also represents the next best thing to finding life outside our world. Alcohol is an organic compound, so if scientists could learn more about how it manages to form in space, they might be able to figure out how life formed. And they can get blitzed doing it.
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