Table Manners of the Stars

In my novel Implies Spaces, I referred to a particularly catastrophic cosmic event as the “big belch.”  Now the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes have viewed a “double burp” from a black hole in a galaxy known by the stirring name SDSS J1354+1327.

The Mighty Williams Prediction Machine rolls on!

Hubble was able to show them that a cloud of blue-green gas extending away from the black hole represented the aftermath of an earlier burp. They found that electrons had been stripped from atoms in the cone of gas and surmise that this was caused by a burst of radiation from the vicinity of the black hole.

In the meantime, it had expanded 30,000 light-years away from the black hole itself.

But the astronomers found a little loop in the images; the sign of a new belch emerging from the cosmic sinkhole . . . 

The observations are important because they support previous theories – not demonstrated until now – that black holes should go through these cycles. The black holes were expected to become very bright in the process of feasting and burping and then go dark during the nap phase.

Nap phase!  Now if only I’d predicted that one, too!