This Is How A Black Hole Sleeps
Sleeping Black Hole Click here to see this amazing image even larger! NASA/JPL-Caltech/JHU It ate a bunch of stellar gas and now it needs a nap. Think of black holes as bottomless devouring machines? Not so much, it turns out: the black hole at the center of the Sculptor galaxy, about 13 million light years away, is currently taking a wee little napsy. We first spied this black hole about a decade ago, when it was happily chomping away on a bunch of excess material in its galaxy. But a new look at the black hole from NASA's Chandra observatory and the NuStar satellite shows that it appears to have gone dormant sometime in the past few years. Our understanding of black hole behavior is not very complete. We know that they can be found in the center of many, if not all, large galaxies, feeding off what are called "accretion discs," basically...