Down To Da Wire

There is a small editorial team writing frantically on one computer. Two are fact checking and one is typing madly. It's nearly 5pm and the production department is getting ready to upload the files to the printer in Kapolei. The entire paper is on hold for one story.

"Braddah! You wen fact check? was what? M81?" asks the one typing.

"Uh. 82 I tink," answers the one on the cell phone.

The writer stops and spins his black leather chair around.

"81, 82 or eighty-tree?"

The one on the landline hangs up and yells over his shoulder. "81!"

"Dumb ass. I give you 81 cracks." says the writer. He spins back around and begins typing madly again. "We running outta time. Production holding our spot fo' dis, and if we no get um tru, they going plop in one in-house ad!"

The landline man gets back on the phone. "Ho!" he shouts when someone picks up on the other line. "You know what? Was twelve million or was sevenee million?"

The writer stops again and stomps his feet, he flips his keyboard over and spins around to face the two other men. "You lolo heads! We cannot even get one simple story pau? Braddahs, you get me dis story in one piece I buy you guys one coors each. We mess up and I break the coors bottle on both yo ulus!"

"Cheee! No get yo panties tied up in one knot!" says the guy on the cell phone.

"Why, I get yo maddah's panty tied in one knot. Take couple days, fo tie um. But I tie um up anyway. And if you no shaddup..."

"Both you pussies! Suck um up and work!" says the man on the landline.

"So what, den?" asks the man on the computer. He is perched and ready, his fingers hover over the keyboard. "Get um? twelve o seventy?"

"First twelve, then seventy."

The man begins typing furiously.

The man on the cell phone barks out "Chandra X-ray observatory! Like me spell um?"

The man typing retorts "Brah, like me spell yo' face? With my fists?" He begins mumbling to himself. "m81. 12 million. 70 million. Chandra X Ray. Telescope. Dining. X-rays. Light curves..."

The two men look at the clock, the second hand is winding down to the deadline. The man on the cell phone is sweating profusely. The man on the landline stands up and starts tapping his foot. "Come on, come on, you fucka. Where you when learn fo' type?"

"Eh, shaddup!"

"Where you when learn for type, skoo fo' da blind?"

"Done! Select da fucka. Cut da fucka. Paste da fucka. Send da fucka."

They all yell in unison "Hooooooooooo!!!"

"Fuckin' made um!"

"Fucka, every time down to da wire!"

"Next time no come late!"

"Das what yo' maddah said."

"Eh. no make la dat. Who buying da beers?"

"I buy you fly."

"Shooooots!"

"Aight guys. Good job. Pau hana!"

The Next Day:

Black Holes All Eat the Same Way

By Noah Swinton, Waipuna Lau, and "Stix" Cabellero.

Black holes are often described as voracious and monstrous, with sloppy eating habits that cause X-rays to be coughed up and spat out willy nilly.

Pushing the dietary analogy a bit further, scientists now say that regardless of where black holes dine, they have the same culinary habits.

Supermassive black holes, which anchor many galaxies, feed just like smaller "stellar" black holes, the researchers announced last week. The finding supports some implications of Einstein's relativity theory that black holes of all sizes have similar properties.

The conclusion comes from a large observing campaign of the spiral galaxy M81, which is about 12 million light-years from Earth. In the center of M81 is a black hole about 70 million times more massive than the sun. It pulls gas from the central region of the galaxy inward at high speed.

Stellar mass black holes typically weigh just a few solar masses and have a different source of food. They pull gas from an orbiting companion star.

In both cases, when black holes dine, material spirals inward and becomes superheated, giving off X-rays and other forms of radiation.

Researchers wondered if they'd have the same feeding mechanism. A study of the X-rays, optical light and radio waves emitted from the jowls of both black hole varieties suggests they do.

Scientists used the Chandra X-ray Observatory and multiple ground-based telescopes to take detailed observations of the huge black hole at the center of the M81 galaxy, and compared these to observations of smaller black holes. They found that while the total energy coming out of the massive black hole was larger, the relative amounts of energy being emitted at different wavelengths — from radio to infrared to X-ray light — were roughly the same.

"The shape of the light curves looks very much the same," said researcher Michael Nowak of MIT. "The only difference is the total energy coming out. The characteristic energy of the matter and the speeds of the jets all seem to work the same way. It's just that big black holes have more matter."

Even the material falling onto the black hole seems to travel at the same speed, regardless of the black hole's size. But since a more massive black hole has a wider event horizon, or distance within which matter cannot escape, it takes material longer to fall in.

"Everything around this huge black hole looks just the same except it's almost 10 million times bigger," Nowak said.

The findings help scientists understand how black holes work on a fundamental level.

"I think what this is really doing is helping us see the connection between different kinds of black holes," Nowak told SPACE.com. "The more we can say that big and small black holes are analogous to each other, it gives us a better idea to understand how black holes eat matter and eject matter."

And because large black holes are thought to play an important role in galaxy formation and evolution, by learning more about black holes scientists can better understand how galaxies came to be, he said.

The findings will be detailed in the Astrophysical Journal.

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Story fo dis one, came from one brainstorm with Jeff Sanner.

The actual news article was written by Robert Roy Brit and Clara Moskowitz.