I recently wrote about a mind-boggling event: astronomers capturing what are apparently the final moments in a star's life as it was literally torn apart by a black hole. Today, NASA has released some new pictures of the event, including this Hubble Space Telescope shot:
[Click to embiggen.] I know, it may not look like much at first. But remember what you're seeing: the violent death of a star ripped apart by the gravity of a black hole... and it's happening 3.8 billion light years away! That's about 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers, so the fact that we can see it at all is pretty amazing. And terrifying. In this false-color Hubble image, the galaxy and explosion are marked. Pretty much everything you see in the picture is a distant galaxy, a billion of more light years away. Normally, the host galaxy itself would appear as a dot, at best with some small ...
