The signal came from the southern sky
traveling through pelagic open space,
in intergalactic waters,
way out in the extragalactic sea
where wails with corkscrew tails
sing like wet rings, bottle-tops
humming up a cacophony
politely one point three billion
miles away we heard-
a New drop in Newtons bucket
a ripple we just heard, a chirp,
a slurp of bodily attraction
placed in interactive
angular momentum
just one parsec apart
and the moan, a new word
pronounced audioastronomy
a visual dichotomy
once again,
we were not using our sense(s).
Let's pretend we're dumb
and listen to what space may say
about a billion yesterdays
inaudible ways.
Image By X-ray: NASA/CXC/Curtin University/R. Soria et al., Optical: NASA/STScI/ Middlebury College/F. Winkler et al. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
Description in English: An extraordinary outburst produced by a black hole in a nearby galaxy has provided direct evidence for a population of old, volatile stellar black holes. The discovery, made by astronomers using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, provides new insight into the nature of a mysterious class of black holes that can produce as much energy in X-rays as a million suns radiate at all wavelengths.
Researchers used Chandra to discover a new ultraluminous X-ray source, or ULX. These objects give off more X-rays than most binary systems, in which a companion star orbits the remains of a collapsed star. These collapsed stars form either a dense core called a neutron star or a black hole. The extra X-ray emission suggests ULXs contain black holes that might be much more massive than the ones found elsewhere in our galaxy.
A paper describing these results will appear in the May 10, 2012, issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
