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Aug 19, 2020

The World’s Most Powerful X-Ray Laser Just Gave Rise to a ‘Molecular Black Hole’

Posted by in category: cosmology

Circa 2017


Imagine you took all sunlight that hits our planet at any given moment, and focussed it on one (unfortunate) piece of Earth the size of a thumbnail. Now times that blistering intensity by 100, and you’re beginning to understand the insanity of the world’s most powerful X-ray laser.

In a surprise result, scientists have focussed the full intensity of this laser onto a single molecule, and the aftermath has given rise to a phenomenon no one’s ever seen before — a molecular ‘black hole’, which consumes anything in its path.

“We certainly weren’t expecting this from previous measurements,” one of the team, Sebastien Boutet from the US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, told Mashable.

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