The winds, detected using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, are ten times faster than any detected at similar black holes in the past. While some bigger black holes feature winds that have hit similar speeds, this changes the way scientists think about smaller black holes for good. Ashley King, of the University of Michigan, said:

This is like the cosmic equivalent of winds from a Category 5 hurricane. We weren’t expecting to see such powerful winds from a black hole like this.

One upshot of the fierce winds is that this black hole, known as IGR J17091, is actually expelling almost as much mass as it’s ingesting. That goes against the common understanding of how black holes work, which usually suggests that they’re like giant cosmic Hoovers, sucking up any and all matter in sight.

Just proof that we don’t know it all and God will reveal to us what he wants, when he wants. Humble yourselves, we serve an incredible God.

- Jack Miller

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

In the mid-nineteenth century, one of the most massive stars in our Milky Way galaxy suddenly got much brighter. For ten years, indeed, it was the second-brightest star in the sky. It’s been unclear exactly what happened to Eta Carinae – but Jose Prieto says his ‘light echo’ technique has shown the eruption was very different from previously thought. As a Luminous Blue Variable (LBV), Eta Carinae has periods of dimness followed by periods of brightness, caused by increased instability and loss of mass. But the Great Eruption was an unprecedented event, in which the star lost several times the mass of the sun. Scientists have until now believed that it was caused by a stellar wind. But the team has now examined eight years’ worth of images showing ‘light echoes’ of the Great Eruption bouncing off interstellar dust. This dust is tens of light years from the star, meaning that the light’s reaching Earth now, rather than in the 1800s when it was spotted directly. In other words, scientists still don’t know exactly what caused Eta Carinae to erupt and lose such a quantity of mass without being destroyed.

The interpretation of this was that the probability was less than one chance in ten to the one thousandth power! In his closing remarks this man said, “Thus, to conclude, we believe that there is a considerable gap in the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, and we believe this gap to be of such a nature that it cannot be bridged within the current biology.”

Probability is expressed as a fraction and hence certainty is 1 and impossibility is 0. On this basis to be helpful to the evolutionists, the author assumed that the probability of evolution being true (if there were no gaps in the fossil record) as 999, which then makes the probability of creation the difference between this and 1, or .001. But there are at least 13 well documented gaps in the fossil record, and actually there are very many more. But again favoring the evolutionists by using this very conservative figure of 13, and putting these numbers in the formula, the result is that the probability of evolution being true is about one chance in 10 x undecillion [ 36 zeros]. Thus, even if assumptions are made favoring the position of the evolutionists, they cannot complain if it still comes out in favor of creation, which it does.

The Apostle Paul:
Your life is hidden with Christ in God. (Col 3:3)

If the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. (2 Cor 5:2)

To those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life. (Rom 2:7)

Each of us rolled out of bed this morning in pursuit of one of these visions of reality or the other. Either this life is my shot at joy and glory, or the next is. No third option.

But it is easy to contrast Bon Jovi’s expression of the world’s pursuit of glory with the Bible’s without recognizing what is so wonderfully right about it.

Jon Bon Jovi is made in the image of God. There is a quest for glory in him that in his fallenness is diseased and thus self-directed, but the healing of that fallen impulse is not to cut off all pursuit of glory but to redirect it from Self to Christ.

Bon Jovi doesn’t want to sludge his way through life. He wants to matter. As he should. Life is frighteningly short and he wants to seize the moment. Even, in his own twisted way, redeem the time. He eschews normalcy.

For you believers who want to play it safe–just make it through life offending as few people as possible, being liked, not stepping on toes, not bothering anyone and not being bothered–you have something to learn from Jon Bon Jovi.

Regeneration is a change from glory-in-self pursuit to glory-in-Christ pursuit, not a change from glory-in-self pursuit to no pursuit of glory at all.

And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not a static thing – but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity