The watch has an electroluminescent backlight which lights up vinyl disks which spin to tell the time.
The star, which spins once in about a day, rotates faster than the disk, and constantly winds up the magnetic fields, which release a great deal of energy when they snap back into lower-energy states.
At some point, centrifugal force caused the globe to flash into a flat disk, which grew larger with continued spinning.
Flash makes data available far faster than hard disk, which relies on mechanical parts to spin its discs.
As the cloud spins faster and faster, it collapses into a disk, which is the maximal balance between gravitational collapse and centrifugal force created by rapid spin.
But this isn't happening in the MWC 656 system, likely because the companion star's disk (which contributes to the black hole's accretion disk) is spinning so fast.
That rate depends on the speed at which the disk is spinning, which in turn determines how quickly a given bit of data arrives under the reading head that is responsible for detecting it and transmitting it to the rest of the machine.Modern hard disks spin at between 5,400 and 15,000 revolutions per minute (rpm).
In both cases, spin is obtained by measuring the inner radius of the accretion disk, which corresponds to the innermost stable circular orbit ISCO.
Kammen also pointed to a creative and competitive form of storage involving flywheels, which use spinning disks or other rotating bodies to store kinetic energy.
And devices that play CDs or MiniDiscs will remain the dominant form of music player for some time, with a combined total of 24m units expected to be sold in 2007, according to IDC's forecasts.Small is beautifulThe iPod is built around a particularly small hard disk, the spinning innards of which measure just 1.8 inches in diameter.
