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NASA finds smallest ever black hole by its 'heartbeat' (video)
NASA's found the smallest black hole it's ever seen, thanks to the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) -- weighing around three times as much our own sun, it's near the bottom weight limit for the super-heavy phenomena. It was discovered by its unique "heartbeat", an X-Ray emission that takes place when gas sucked from a nearby star is swirled around the event horizon until friction causes it to super-heat. The disc then repeats the process every 40 seconds and when examined, looks just like the readout on an ECG machine. After the break we've got a video that talks you through it all and we won't mind if you start booming "Space... the final frontier..." halfway through -- we did too.
NASA building a harpoon to fire at comets, suddenly renders plot of 'Armageddon' plausible (video)
Whatever Michael Bay uses to propel that "high-concept" imagination of his, he's obviously passed some of it to the boys at NASA's Goddard Space Flight center. A team there is developing a hollow-bodied harpoon that can be fired from a cannon toward comets too dangerous to land on. Once landed, it fills up with sub-surface samples before winched back aboard the waiting space craft. It's currently being tested by firing the harpoon (using a six foot ballista) into a bucket of dirt -- if they fired it horizontally it'd travel about a mile. After the break we've got video explaining this madness in some detail -- which we promise is Aerosmith-ballad free.
