Itty Bitty Black Hole Discovered

Along with the great visibility of Venus and Mars in the pre-dawn sky and Saturn in the evening, the big event this week is something we can’t even see: a partial solar eclipse. In this case the moon is just far enough away from earth that the darkest portion of the moon’s shadow won’t even reach the earth and the surrounding lighter shadow of the moon, the penumbra only barely scrapes across the extreme southern Indian Ocean and part of Antarctica. BUT since eclipses come solar then lunar – two weeks apart, we WILL experience a total lunar eclipse on the evening of Sept. 27th – while Pope Francis is in Philadelphia!

What has 50,000 times the mass of our sun, but is dark and grabby? The universe’s smallest black hole discovered to date!