E-Paper
Black holes show how to be fuel efficient
If a car were as fuel efficient as the black holes, it would travel more than 1 billion miles on one gallon (3.8 litres) of petrol. This is because black holes are the most fuel efficient engines in the universe, the US space agency NASA said on Monday.
If a car were as fuel efficient as the black holes, it would travel more than 1 billion miles on one gallon (3.8 litres) of petrol. This is because black holes are the most fuel efficient engines in the universe, the US space agency NASA said on Monday.
Black holes — former stars so massive that even light cannot escape them — also are 20 times more efficient than nuclear reactors, the NASA study found. NASA scientists said that the new findings, using the agency's Chandra X-Ray Observatory, gave insight on how nine black holes generated their huge energy in space.
The scientists said that they calculated the size of the galaxies' inner regions to estimate how much fuel— gas in space that is drawn into the black holes — is available.
Then the observatory's images were used to estimate how much power was developed by the resulting jets of high-energy particles to create huge bubbles, or cavities, in the galaxies' hot gas.
