Black holes by Claudia Sonea

On Wednesday US astronomers revealed that around the Milky Way might exist hundreds of rogue black holes ready to swallow stars and planets on a range of a few hundred kilometers. They put off the people's uneasiness by adding that the black holes are unlikely to pose a threat to Earth, but may engulf nebulae, stars and planets that cross their paths. Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee is one of the participants at the study and she concluded that it is a very slight chance that the observed black holes to actually effect Earth in the lifetime of the Universe and there are more dangerous things that lures in our planet's neighborhood. Due to the fact that only two observations of the previously named objects until now, it is hard to intermediate mass black holes and supermassive or stellar-mass black holes. Holley-Bockelmann and colleagues at the University of Michigan and Penn State University simulated the collision between intermediate mass black holes and stellar-sized black holes, which are plentiful in globular clusters- swarms of stars- and come to the result that it would generate hundreds of mid-size black holes, and that the force of their combinations would catapult them out of the globular cluster at speeds of up to 4,000 kilometers per second. This experiment was presented on Wednesday at the 211th American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas, where other researchers from Ohio State University reported a new X-ray source in the galaxy of Centarus A, which is thought to be a binary star system. According to supposition the two stars formed together with one evolving more quickly and transforming in a black hole. As a conclusion, don't worry, for now nothing is endangering our precious specie or planet. Don't forget that the harm can come still form the inside so, keep the environment clean and healthy. Green power!

related story: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/afp/20080109/tsc-us-science-blackholes-e123fef_1.html

by Claudia Sonea for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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