Yikes!!!

Wed Oct 31, 4:14 PM ET

The massive newcomer beats the previous stellar-mass black hole discovered October 17 in the M33 galaxy that has 16 times the mass of our Sun, the US space agency said.

Like the much larger, supermassive black holes found at galaxy centers, stellar-mass black holes have such powerful gravity fields that not even light can escape them. Astronomers estimate their mass by measuring their gas emissions and the gravitational effect on the stars they orbit.

"We weren't expecting to find a stellar-mass black hole this massive," says Andrea Prestwich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Lead author of the discovery paper in the November 1 Astrophysical Journal Letters, Prestwich and his team found the new stellar-mass black hole using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

"We now know that black holes that form from dying stars can be much larger than we had realized," he added.

Prestwich's team was able to measure the black hole's mass because it has an orbiting companion: a hot, highly evolved star. The star is ejecting gas in the form of a wind.

Some of this material spirals toward the black hole, heats up, and gives off powerful X-rays before crossing the point of no return.

What's inside a blackhole anyway? Is there such a thing as a whitehole?

 

And also the longest death ever according to the general theory of relativity.  As you approach a gravity well, time slows down immensely.  Within the event horizon of a black hole, it could take you millions or billions of years to be crushed into your component subatomic particles. 

There is also a theory that at one point you would exist in two places at once, so you could watch yourself being slowly squashed assunder.

 

Of course the best way to do it would be while listening to Disaster Area while travelling on their space ship

1. A black hole is a collapsed star, so inside it are all the sub-atomic particles that made up the original star.

 

2. A white hole is exactly the same as a black hole except that it the complete opposite  (these things only really exist in the Mathematical sense) - it a) has no mass and b) emits particles.

 

It could be argued that black holes and white holes are the same thing, but in white holes time is reversed.

 

Another theory is that a black hole is connected via a wormhole to a white hole in a paralelle universe, matter sucked into the black hole travels along the wormhole and is spewed out of the white hole.

 

Fish, bananas, old pyjamas,
Mutton! Beef! and Trout!
Anything goes in...