From Yahoo.com
Scientists have witnessed the rare spectacle of a supermassive black hole devouring a star that had ventured too close -- an event that occurs about once in 10,000 years, they reported on Wednesday.
Matter-sucking black holes normally lurk dormant and undetected at the centre of galaxies, but can occasionally be tracked by the scraps left over from their stellar fests.
"Black holes, like sharks, suffer from a popular misconception that they are perpetual killing machines," said researcher Ryan Chornock from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts.
"Actually, they're quiet for most of their lives. Occasionally a star wanders too close, and that's when a feeding frenzy begins."
If a star passes too close, the black hole's gravitational pull can rip it apart before sucking in its gases, which are heated by the friction and start to glow -- giving away the silent killer's hiding place.
A computer simulated photo from Nasa (Yahoo/AFP)
Scientists can only watch in awe.
While it is true that contemporary scientists have been experimenting with man made black hole machine via the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to study several theories which I earlier pointed out, such as the Higgs boson “elementary particles cause matter to have mass”, validity of the Grand Unification Theory (are electromagnetism, strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force a single manifestation?), existence of the superstring theory (quantum gravity) and dark matter and dark energy, yet they cannot explain much of why black holes exists, the role it plays, or how a catastrophic disaster (Armageddon) can be avoided.
Yet the solar system where planet earth belongs to faces the same black swan risk from black holes as any planetary or star systems.
As I wrote in 2010 (emphasis original)
Yes, you may forget the farcical anthropogenic climate change, because the forces of nature would be exponentially be way far far far far more powerful and potent than the outcome from any of our collective destructive actions.
Besides, as remarked by the scientists interviewed in the TV documentary program, like any part of nature, our world operates on its own cycle. This means that the “ice age” could be just around the corner in some thousands of years to come, while the sun will expire on its own, by running out of fuel to burn, in about 5 billion years, and that today’s “aging” earth, even without the sun’s demise, will likely meet its end on its own.
And the sad part is that there is nothing mortal man can do to stop it. Every species or anything else that is part of nature will cyclically become extinct.
What’s my point in showing this?
Comedian George Carlin in this video has rightly been saying that too much self importance has been given in what man can do over the environment, such that we make a political spectacle/fuzz out of it.
In reality, humans represent only an iota in the overall spectrum of the universe.
Also our knowledge has been severely constrained to comprehend nature in its entirety, in as much as even understanding human action, the digital age notwithstanding.
In short, parlaying limited and presumptive of knowledge of the environment into public policies are fraught with the risks of unintended consequences. The existence of black holes only underscores this.
