They are the most efficient engines of destruction known to humanity. Their intense gravity is a one-way ticket to oblivion for anything that strays too close; inside them is undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns. We see them only because the victims do not go quietly to their doom. Material spiraling into a black hole can heat up to millions of degrees and glow brightly. Some of its kinetic energy and momentum may be transferred to a jet of particles flowing outward at close to the speed of light. Black holes of varying sizes take the rap for fusillades of radiation and plasma that astronomers observe all over the cosmos.
http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=0004567B-11FB-1EDD-8E1C809EC588EF21
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