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Friday, September 1st, 2017

Monster x-ray machine blasts apart black hole theory

Author:     Michael Franco
Source:     Sandia National Laboratories/New Atlas
Publication Date:     August 30, 2017
 Link: Monster x-ray machine blasts apart black hole theory
Stephan:   The beauty of science is that it is a process not a goal, and it is constantly subject to re-evaluation, which even scientists often find hard to take aboard. Here is an example of what I mean, and how this works. It looks like this new research is going to rewrite the textbooks. The research discussed in this report has just been published  in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The Z machine at Sandia National Laboratories creates tremendous bursts of energy using less power than it would take to light 100 homes for a few minutes
Credit: Sandia National Laboratories

There is lightning being made in Albuquerque, New Mexico. But unlike the kind that shoots between sky and earth, this lightning takes place inside the Z machine at Sandia National Laboratories. The lightning made inside this miracle of engineering carries more than 1,000 times the electricity of a regular bolt, and is 20,000 times faster – so fast, in fact, that the pulse released would go as fast as traveling from Los Angeles to New York in slightly less than one second. The machine also produces intense X-rays, and researchers have just used this component of the its ability to shake up a long-held theory regarding black holes.

The Z machine is the world’s most powerful source of laboratory radiation. It’s used to study how materials act under extreme conditions (it can melt diamonds, for example) as well to conduct fusion experiments and run […]

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1 Comment

  1. Rev. Dean on Saturday, September 2, 2017 at 3:42 pm

    I never have believed that black holes existed because of gravity. The astrophysicists keep ignoring the fact that electricity is a billion-billion times more powerful than gravity and has the most powerful effect than anything in the Universe, and plasma carries electricity in these most potent of all forms throughout the Universe.