NuSTAR

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	NuSTAR Ever since Princeton physicist John Wheeler coined the term nearly 50 years ago, black holes have evoked a sense of mystery and wonder for astronomers and space enthusiasts. But unlike comets, stars and other beautiful objects in the night sky, black holes can't actually be seen -- they trap light, after all. From this infinitely dark void, myths and misconceptions have taken flight, spurred by the sci-fi depictions of black holes as cold cosmic villains with a bottomless appetite for nearby planets, stars and mighty spacecrafts whizzing through the galaxy at warp speed. Even though black holes don't behave like the celestial monsters with insatiable appetites they're sometimes caricatured to be, there is still plenty of wonder and unanswered questions about them to satisfy astronomers for years to come. For example, scientists have distinguished between two major classes of black holes -- stellar black holes (also known as stellar-mass black holes) and supermassive black holes. The former are roughly six to 30 times the mass of the sun and the latter are a whopping million to billions of times the mass of the sun. So are there intermediate-mass black holes, on the order of hundreds to thousands of times the mass of the sun? Quite possibly, yes. In August, a team from Keio University in Japan announced their discovery of a region of space 30000 light years away which they suspect might contain young, intermediate-mass black holes. One of these black hole candidates is <b>...</b>	From: Kowch737 Views: 8 1 ratings
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