A stars dying scream may be a beacon for physics
Tuesday, August 14, 2012 - 08:01
in Astronomy & Space
When a star suffered an untimely demise at the hands of a hidden black hole, astronomers detected its doleful, ululating wail in the key of D-sharp, no less from 3.9 billion light-years away. The resulting ultraluminous X-ray blast revealed the supermassive black holes presence at the center of a distant galaxy in March of 2011, and now that information could be used to study the real-life workings of black holes, general relativity, and a concept first proposed by Einstein in 1915.