In this week's episode of Enterprise, "Singularity," the crew diverts to visit an unusual black hole — one residing within a trinary star system. While Vulcans had visited several hundred black holes, this one was odd enough to warrant a closer look. Unfortunately, the environment surrounding this phenomenon causes some rather obsessive behavior in the human crew and their Denobulan doctor.

Rewind back to the 21st century, when several interesting discoveries have been announced in the past week regarding some black hole oddities.

One discovery has to do with a black hole known as GRO J1655-40. This object is moving rather fast through space — nearly 250,000 miles per hour. This is four times the rate at which stars in the immediate vicinity are moving. One suggested cause for this great speed: the aftereffects of a supernova.

Black holes possess a gravitational field that is so powerful that not even light can escape. They form after a cataclysmic event such as the collapse of a star during a supernova. Since black holes are "black," astronomers often have to look for the effects that a black hole has on nearby objects to infer their existence, and study their behavior.

In this case, GRO J1655-40 has a companion star orbiting it once every 2.6 days. The star apparently survived the supernova that created the black hole. As it circles the black hole it is slowly being devoured. This process creates quite a show — one we can see as jets of superheated material ejected at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. (Illustration courtesy Space Telescope Science Institute)

Observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope were crucial to understanding what is happening within the GRO J1655-40/companion star pair. Oh yes, I almost forgot: GRO J1655-40 is heading more-or-less in our direction ... but don't worry, it'll give us a wide berth as it passes through the neighborhood millions of years from now.

Black holes come in a variety of sizes. In the case of GRO J1655-40, this object is the result of a large star several times the size of our Sun collapsing in upon itself. There are black holes of vastly greater size as well. Indeed, it is now thought that supermassive black holes (each with the mass of hundreds or thousands of stars) lurk at the heart of many galaxies. Until now one supermassive black hole per galaxy was all that had been detected.

Enter NGC 6240 — an exceptionally bright galaxy recently observed by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. It has not one, but two supermassive black holes at its center. These two objects are currently orbiting about one another, but will eventually merge several hundred million years in the future. When they do merge, an even larger black hole — and an extraordinary celestial display — will result, with ripples in the fabric of space that will be felt across the universe. (Photo courtesy NASA)

It is thought that this previously unobserved situation is the result of two galaxies colliding, each with its own black hole. Indeed, it has been shown that there is a lot of star formation underway in NGC 6240 — something that is often seen in galaxies that have collided — which is a process that pumps a lot of energy into their respective collections of stars and dust clouds.

The crew of Enterprise encountered some unexpected neurological effects as they moved closer to the unusual black hole they sought to examine. It all seemed to start with a headache. The regions surrounding a black hole can be treacherous. As random material from the surrounding universe is pulled in, it is literally torn apart at the atomic level. When stars are ripped apart, the results can be truly cataclysmic.

Given the ripples in space-time, jets of stellar matter ejected at relativistic speeds, and staggering amounts of radiation, this is certainly a place where hazards to human health can only be imagined.

But we won't know what these dangers truly are until we go there, now will we?

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