Developing Storm

Thursday, October 23, 2003
The detailed physics of stars and black holes is way beyond me but I can usually grok the basics. That's until I read this news bit from Scientific American. The article describes a new celestial 'object' that is a pairing of a normal star and super dense object (like a black hole or neutron star) all surrounded by a 'dense shell' of star stuff, dense enough that only 'photons with the highest energies could escape' it. I can accept that - the universe is full of strange and wondrous things. My real problem is with this explanation for its existence from the article.
The researchers posit that material ejected from the companion star, its so-called stellar wind, is accreted by the black hole to form a dense shell around the pair.
Now I realize the writers of popular science news sometimes take liberty with the facts but I usually give the folks at Scientific America the benefit of the doubt. What I don't get is how gravity of these two massive objects could act to accrete a shell around themselves from the stellar wind. I could imagine some swirling disk of star dust but not a shell. If someone can explain this to me I would appreciate it.

[ no comments ]