Aug 16 1999
From The Space Library
A team of astrophysicists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center announced that they had found the first direct evidence of a black hole pulling in matter. Using the Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics, an x-ray satellite belonging to Japan and the United States and launched in 1993, the team observed superheated gas in the accretion disc of the black hole. Previously, scientists had only "seen" the phenomenon by observing these accretion discs, or "the swirling matter circling around as it is being pulled into the black hole." However, this time, the Goddard team had observed a "strange feature" buried in the x-rays that the gas emitted. Energy had been redshifted, an occurrence described as an "astronomical Doppler effect," because, just as the compression of sound waves, for example, causes the sound of a siren to rise and fall as it passes an observer, light stretches as it speeds away from Earth. The team observed light that was being stretched-redshifted-moving at about 6.5 million miles (10.5 million kilometers) per hour, toward a black hole in galaxy NGC 3516.
Swedish state prosecutors charged Charlie Malm and Joel Soederberg of Stockholm, who had broken into NASA computer systems between October and December 1996, with violating Sweden's computer laws and with buying stolen equipment. In the trial, scheduled for sometime in the fall, NASA intended to demonstrate that the pair had "caused NASA great economic loss." Malm and Soederberg had also broken into the computer systems of the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, and U.S. Marines, as well as the system of a British Internet company.
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