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Article: X-ray study: energy from a black hole?(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- Science News
- Article date:
- November 3, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Science Service, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Black holes are the ultimate suck-ups. Everything--even light--that comes near the crushing gravity of these ultradense bodies falls in, and nothing gets out.
Scientists now claim that for the first time, they've observed energy extracted from a black hole, or more precisely, from the whirl of surrounding space that, according to previous studies, a spinning black hole drags along with it (SN: 11/15/97, p. 308).
Jorn Wilms of the University of Tubingen in Germany and his colleagues, who include Christopher S. Reynolds of the University of Maryland in College Park, base their findings on studies of a supermassive black hole about 100 million times the ...