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TOPIC: XRF111111

Blobrana

L

Posts: 131433

Date: Dec 22 02:18 2012

MAXI J0158-744	Permalink

Black hole exposed as a dwarf in disguise The white dwarf thought it was sending all the right signals. Embedded near a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, the star was emitting short, bright X-ray flashes that made it look like a feeding black hole. But after a multi-agency stakeout, cosmic detectives have blown the dwarf's cover. Behind the black hole façade, the white dwarf was stealing mass from a much larger companion, a process that occasionally causes a titanic thermonuclear blast. The discovery marks the first such binary system known, and hints that similar pairings may be hiding in plain sight across the universe. Read more __________________

Blobrana

L

Posts: 131433

Date: Dec 18 01:25 2012

XRF111111	Permalink

How white dwarfs mimic black holes A remarkable observation by astronomers from the University of Southampton has been published in one of the world's foremost astrophysics research journals. The research by Professor Phil Charles, Professor Malcolm Coe and postgraduate student Liz Bartlett has appeared in The Astrophysical Journal that is devoted to recent developments, discoveries, and theories in astronomy and astrophysics. The Southampton Physics and Astronomy team are part of a global collaboration - with colleagues in Taiwan, South Africa, Poland, Australia and Italy - that has revealed that bright X-ray flares in nearby galaxies, once assumed to indicate the presence of black holes, can in fact be produced by white dwarfs. They made the discovery by detecting a dramatic, short-lived X-ray flare that was picked up by an X-ray telescope on the International Space Station. Read more __________________

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