Jun 5, 2006

Black holes are green

Posted in Astronomy at 7:45 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment

The environmental impact of black holes is perhaps a distant and esoteric concept, unless you’re waiting for part 2 of the latest Dr Who story, but US astronomers have used the latest observations of nine black holes with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to estimate directly the efficiency of black holes. Their calculations show that black holes are perhaps the most fuel efficient engines in the universe, with a remarkably high fraction of the energy they consume being converted into work. Read on in the latest issue of our physical sciences webzine - Spotlight.

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