Tag Archives: Star

Earlier this week the news began reporting on an article released in the journal Nature. It seems that astronomers noticed something very strange happening around a massive black hole 4.5 billion light-years away in the constellation Draco. NASA’s Swift Observatory captured a massive release of radiation streaming from Draco’s black hole. Instead of an expected brief flash, however, this radiation stream which seemed to be coming from the black hole was intense and kept going, and going, and going. The transformation of silent, massive black hole to screaming, massive black hole can only be explained by the black hole eating something gargantuan…something like a star. Scientists believe we’re actually watching a black hole devour a star piece by piece in real time – real time in this case means this star actually met its end around 4.5 billion years ago and we’re just seeing it now.

Another pretty remarkable thing happened around 4.5 billion years ago and 4.5 billion light-years away:  a tiny rock formed from nebula dust. Some pretty amazing things have happened on that rock since, not the least of which is a bunch of bipedal, nearly hairless primates figured out a way to send something called the Swift Observatory into orbit around their home. They accomplished this in time for it to catch a glimpse of energy waves that began a journey across the universe just as their own world was forming. Across the vastness of space a star is slowly destroyed and a new world is slowly formed–two events occurring independently but now forever linked because a fragile little species lifted their eyes from the earth and wondered.