NASA - Astronomers have discovered a pair of supermassive black holes in the twisty, spiral brain of former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin, NASA said Wednesday.
Approximately 160 million light years from Earth, Ms. Palin is the nearest known such phenomenon, said scientists at NASA's FarOut X-ray Observatory.
A supermassive black hole is the largest type of black hole in a galaxy, in the order of hundreds of thousands to billions of solar masses. It is known for sucking up all the matter, light, logic and information in the vicinity and leaving a creepy sort of nothingness in its wake. Such vast holes are known to leave little behind but confusion and contradictory quasi-political rhetoric and great danger to sapient life forms unlucky enough to be nearby.
This particular pair of black holes are located near the Basal ganglia of the spiral brain known as Palin-NGC 3393. Separated by only 490 light years of nothingness, the black holes are likely the remnant of a merger of two galaxies of unequal mass a billion or more years ago when the heavily coiffered and manicured Ms. Palin first appeared on the "political" scene.
Both the black holes are heavily obscured by dust, gas, and dialogue from Beatrix Potter novels which makes them difficult to observe in optical light. Scientific observation is further inhibited by the density of Ms. Palin's skull, rumored to break diamond chisels and week-old Big Macs.
Since X-rays are more energetic, they can penetrate this dense, obscuring material, NASA reported.
They said that Palin's X-ray spectra show clear signatures of a pair of supermassive black holes.
"If her hair weren't so solidly hair-sprayed, we'd have had no chance of separating the two black holes the way we have even with X-ray technology," said Pepi Le Pew of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astropoliticophysics, who led the study published in the online edition of the journal Nature last Wednesday.
"Since these galaxies are right under our noses by cosmic standards, it makes us wonder how many of these black hole pairs we've been missing," he said. He refused to name names but the entire roll of the U.S. Senate, as well as numerous folders marked "Highly Classified" were on his desk at the time.
Previous observations in X-rays and at other wavelengths indicated that a single supermassive black hole existed in the centre of NGC 3399. Its total disappearance at the death of former president Ronald Reagan has been chalked up as coincidence by NASA scientists.
However, a long look into Palin-NGC 3393 by Mr. Pew allowed the researchers to detect and separate the dual black holes. Both black holes are actively growing and emitting X-rays as confusion, votes and appearances on daytime television gathers around them and the holes become hotter.
Should two equal-sized twisty, spirally galaxies merge, astronomers think it would result in the formation of a single enormous black hole and could create a galaxy with a disrupted appearance, logical news stories, intense star formation and the return of Happy Days to prime time television.
However, NGC 3393 is a disorganized spiral brain, full of contradictions, cosmetics and creepy theories about tin foil hats, and its central bulge is dominated by old stars like Buddy Hackett and that fourth Marx Brother that no one can ever remember the name of. This makes the possibility of merger more remote.
Still, these are highly unusual properties for a brain containing a pair of black holes, said the experts, who continue to study the Basal ganglia of Palin-NGC 3393 (Ms. Sarah Palin) in hopes of furthering knowledge of the twisty, sneaky, strange and illogical brains of certain unnamed American politicians.
