BOY, when black holes exhale, they sure don’t kid around.
Scientists are studying a gigantic plasma cloud that is six million light years wide (the Space.com article notes that an earlier press release erroneously said the cloud was 600 million light years wide), which could be the product of the “collective sigh of several supermassive black holes.”
Here’s an excerpt from the Space.com article:
“One of the most exciting aspects of the discovery is the new questions it poses,” said study leader Philipp Kronberg of Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico. “For example, what kind of mechanism could create a cloud of such enormous dimensions that does not coincide with any single galaxy or galaxy cluster? Is that same mechanism connected to the mysterious source of ultra high energy cosmic rays that come from beyond our galaxy?”
The plasma cloud is located about 300 million light years away near the Coma Cluster and is spread across a vast region of space thought to contain several galaxies with supermassive black holes, or active galactic nuclei (AGN), embedded at their centers.
April 23rd, 2007 at 8:42 pm
[...] Inside Science: When black holes sigh [...]
July 7th, 2007 at 1:10 am
Perhaps, these supermassive blackholes are the results of huge planets collision. After such collision, there will be a great suction that will take place. All the matters that can be forced out from the two big planets will form a third mass. This third big mass of matter will be formed due to less attractive force between the two big planets, as they part ways after collision.