The Devil's Sister, Crude Outbursts and Burps from Black Holes

With all the recent controversial "crude outbursts" from the president of a certain country let's have a look at things a little more unusual.

Above is an artist's interpretation of a phenomenon that some astronomers have recognized:

• Astronomers have caught a massive black hole letting out a "double burp" after bingeing on hot gas.
• When cosmic gas comes near one of these sinkholes, it gets sucked in - but some of the energy is released back into space in the form of a burp.
• Now, the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes have detected a new belch emerging from a black hole located about 800 million light-years away.
• But they saw a remnant of another belch that occurred 100,000 years earlier.
• "Black holes are voracious eaters, but it turns out they don't have very good table manners," Julie Comerford, from the University of Colorado, Boulder, told the 231st American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington DC.

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[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-42655685]

When I learn about exploring space like this it makes me feel so very small.  Well it makes us all look so very small.

So basically those "crude outbursts" are well little more than insignificant hot air in huge universe.  I'm sure a certain person would disagree with me but there you go.

In actual fact, as part of making us look so very small, there is now a British satellite floating above us which can take films in very high detail:

• A British satellite has gone into orbit on an Indian rocket to acquire full-colour, high-definition video of the surface of the Earth.
  
• ...
• The spacecraft is a pre-production model. If it performs well over the coming months, its manufacturer, SSTL, also in Guildford, will proceed with Earth-i's first batch of five operational spacecraft.
  
• ...
  
• It has the ability to point and stare at a particular location. It can take a still picture or gather two-minute movie sequences.
• "We can collect up to 50 frames per second which is a lot of information," explained Earth-i CEO Richard Blain.
• "That allows us to stack the individual images and increase our effective resolution, achieving somewhere around 65cm to 75cm," he told BBC News.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-42654281#]

So Pres Trump give it a wave as it goes past.  Make sure you limit your vocalized hot air - we don't want this satellite going off orbit.

By the way, this satellite technology is not alone:

• Big things sometimes come in small packages. That's the hope of Finnish start-up ICEYE, who are about to see their first satellite go into orbit.
• The young company are making waves because they're attempting what no-one has dared try before; indeed, what many people had previously said was impossible.
• ICEYE aim to launch a constellation of sub-100kg radar micro-satellites that will circle the Earth, returning multiple pictures daily of any spot on the globe, whether it's dark or light, good weather or bad.

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[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-42648391]

With the advancement of technology, explorations from space are no longer limited to a small number are very big countries like the USA.

I suppose this reminds me of the articles I wrote about the frequent insecurity about that advancing technology.

The use of technology to commit murders is something I write about in my novel Deprivations: The Psychopath and the Child.  (You know it feels strange remembering how methodical I was in writing about how to use that technology to kill people.  As for how I wrote how the baddies murdered people in my novel The Devil's Sister. )

Anyway...