Not really sure about this source but I thought of you guys.

I thought black holes were still something that might exist until recently. I should have stuck to that Astronomy GCSE after all

I'm stuck wondering why that in this video it looks like something is coming out of the hole, I thought it just sucked things up, like Tootally man.




Black Hole Eats Star

I'm with Snowy about the quality of the HP's reporting of all things "science~ie". I have yet to see or read a report from them that didn't have some sort of inaccuracy in it.

As to those long, thin blue columns you see that seem to emerge from the "center" of the black hole, that's the "energy burst" the HP said was "hurtling toward earth", and the article was mostly correct in their description of the makeup of those jets of energy. They don't really come from inside the black hole itself, but are created at the extreme inner edge of the "event horizon", where the forces of gravity and inertia are so great that things get a little strange, and much of the energy created (as matter is "destroyed") is "kicked up", but the "spin" that the energy still has imparted to it is so strong it acts like the barrel of a rifle, and keeps the jet in a very narrow angle as it escapes. There are several theories as to how these jets are created, but my favourite is that, at the final instant of interaction of matter, inertia and gravity, massive quantities of anti-matter are formed, and interact with similar quantities of regular matter, which violently cancel each other out. But due to the "shape" of the forces involved, there are only two ways for the energy to "escape": into the black hole (which the overwhelmingly vast majority of the energy goes), or "up through the maelstrom", which results in the high energy particles we "see".

Thanks for getting me up to date folks.  Yes I was a bit wary of that site.