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Wednesday
Jan042017

Some Bizarre Black Holes Put On Light Shows

"People think of black holes as nightmare vacuum cleaners, sucking in everything in reach, from light to stars to Matthew McConaughey in the movie Interstellar. But, in real life, black holes don't consume everything that they draw in."

"'They're actually pretty picky eaters,' says Jedidah Isler, an astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University. She spends most days chipping away at one of the universe's biggest mysteries: How do the huge, overactive black holes, known as quasars, work?"

"'They are billions of times the mass of our own sun,' she says. 'I like to call them 'hyperactive,' in the sense that they are just taking on a lot more than an average black hole.'"

"And these monster black holes tend to do something strange. They not only reject material, but they use it to put on a space version of a fireworks show, shooting out shredded stars and other things in a stream of light and charged particles."

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