When Japan launched a groundbreaking black-hole-monitoring satellite, no one was quite sure what it would see, since black holes are, in many ways, truly the final frontier, impenetrable voids in space. The image above is the last thing the satellite saw before it died.

A series of errors sent the satellite out of control, but not before it was able to take some pictures and relay data back to Earth about black holes and their potential role in galaxy formation.

Hitomi’s final observations were of the Perseus Cluster around 240 million light years away with a super-massive black hole at its center. The surprise, for scientists, was the lack of activity. “The intracluster gas is quieter than expected,” said co-author Andrew Fabian of Cambridge University. “We expected that the level would be higher based on the activity of the central galaxy.” Instead, there was calm at the center of this spatial storm.

“The surprise is that it turns out that the energy being pumped out of the black hole is being very efficiently absorbed,” said co-author Brian McNamara of the University of Waterloo. “This hot gas that we’re looking at with Hitomi is the stuff of the future, it’s the gas out of which galaxies form. There is much more of this hot gas than there are stars in the galaxy, or there’s more stuff that wasn’t made into galaxies than that was.”

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Scientists have spotted a rare and cosmic event happening 3.5 billion light years from Earth: the impending collision of a pair of black holes, each spiraling in slowly around the other.

Astronomers at Caltech identified a cosmic event, confirmed by researchers Columbia University, and while no one is certain how things will play out, it is estimated that the collision will release destructive gravitational waves through space-time with power equivalent to 1,000,000 supernovas.

Black holes are extremely dense objects whose gravitational pulls are so great that not even light can escape. Most galaxies seem to have a supermassive black hole, which can be problematic when galaxies merge. Two supermassive black holes usually enter into orbit with each other, until they interact with other celestial objects, like interstellar gas. As more research is done on this real unfolding example, there is a vast range of potential new knowledge to be gained from such an unusual cosmic collision.

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Each year, an entire lake in Oregon fills up with water, and then empties through a giant hole in its bottom, turning into a temporary meadow and sending its contents into the ground toward an unidentified set of mystery destinations. There is speculation about the moisture seeping into aquifers, but no study has yet managed to successfully track where the flow goes.

Per TreeHugger, “The volcanic landscape of the area gives way to a number of quirky geologic traits – the one responsible for swallowing the lake is a lava tube. The tunnel-like structure is formed when flowing lava hardens near the surface but continues to flow downwards, and the inner lava escapes before hardening. The result, a tube that opens to the surface and leads to the mysterious depths below.”

While the cycle is predictable and the forces behind it known, the sight is nonetheless dramatic and the ultimate fate of the lake’s waters still stumps scientists. A number of people have also attempted to ‘plug’ the whole with cars and other matter, but even if this were to work it would unbalance the natural process in place, not solving any real problems. For those fascinated by lost lakes, it is well worth reading the story of Lake Peigneur, a body of water that emptied entirely when miners accidentally pierced it from below: “The resultant whirlpool sucked in the drilling platform, eleven barges, many trees and 65 acres (260,000 m2) of the surrounding terrain. So much water drained into those caverns that the flow of the Delcambre Canal that usually empties the lake into Vermilion Bay was reversed, making the canal a temporary inlet.”

The post Whole ‘Lost Lake’ Drains Down Mysterious Hole in Ground first appeared on Gajitz.