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Chandra Sees Black Hole Rip Star Apart
beeplet writes "Nasa just sent out this press release titled about an exciting Chandra observation. It states: "Thanks to two orbiting X-ray observatories, astronomers have the first strong evidence of a supermassive black hole ripping apart a star and consuming a portion of it.
The event, captured by NASA's Chandra and ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray Observatories, had long been predicted by theory, but never confirmed."
There is more information on the Chandra home page, including the x-ray and optical observations that were involved in the discovery." Note that the star-ripping pictured on the front page is labeled an illustration, rather than an recorded image.
it was just unicron eating one of the autobot mooons.
This is super.
A lot of astronomers, scientists, and general hobyists were in great doubt that black holes even exist. Now a lot more people will be more interasted in the field (or area) of this study.
I, on the other hand, was confident. It just makes great sence to me.
Black hole rips star a new one!
This is just another conspiracy by the white man. First it's black holes distroying this, then dark matter touching that. What's a brother gotta do to earn a little respect in the universe?
The Enterprise slams out of that hole and Jean Luc shouts "All hands abandon ship...Repeat, all hands abandon ship!"
...at such rate that there will be no Great Crunch, doesn't mean WE (oour solar system) won't get swallowed by a black hole.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Police investigation into the brutal act led to one eye witness, Chandra, who described the black hole's violent attack as "gruesome."
Clip at 11.
strong evidence of a supermassive black hole ripping apart a star and consuming a portion of it
The goatse jokes pretty much write themselves at this point.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
The site is becoming a little slow already, so here is a text-only version. The http://chandra.harvard.edu site seems to be slashdoted already.
You must work for Fox.
cat star > /dev/null
i thought black holes were not proven to exist, or am i living in the past?
http://www.rayn.net . Funny. Stuff.
lemme guess - you just put it up for sale about 50 minutes ago?
The heartburn after chowing down on one of these has to be brutal. Where do you find a Rolaids or Tums to quench that sucker?
I know Stefanie a little bit (overlapped at some meetings). This is her second coup in the last year -- she was also involved with using X-ray observations to identify a binary black hole in another active galaxy. There has been good evidence for such X-ray flaring in the past from ROSAT data alone (now you see it, now you don't), but this is the first time to catch one of these things in the act using XMM and Chandra which are much more capable than the previous generation of X-ray telescopes. XMM can collect more photons, and Chandra can provide image quality equal to that of optical telescopes (telescopes like ROSAT were 100 times worse). We still have no idea how important such stellar disruptions are in the grand scheme of thing, fuelling black holes, etc., but dang, they are cool. I want to put one in a science fiction novel someday.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
There is this thing called the "slashdot effet". It is this massive site that suck all of the bandwith of smaller sites, although theorists also speculate that it cunsumes massive quanties of people's time at work. researchers on this issue are currently busy attacking the sco theory at said site....
Does anyone have an idea how fast a blackhole 'finishes' a planet?
I mean, we have a blackhole closing in the Solar System, do we, the puny human, have time to feel anything? And if we do, what kind of thing will be happening on Earth?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
I can make a movie about how a mad science builds a station close to the black hole and there'll be robots and cool FX! It'll be awesome! Oh wait...
In a twist, this time it was the hole tearing a new one.
God Bless America. Why? Did it sneeze?
from Timbo's blurb "Note that the star-ripping pictured on the front page is labeled an illustration, rather than an recorded image."
looks pretty clear to me that he said its not a photo. oh - but thats right - you're an asshat.
Nope, it was in the story text all the time. The grandparent and the parent are both written by Amsterdam Vallon, a well known karma-whore we've all grown to hate. That's why he's posting at -1.
A radio telescope has captured a wave pattern of a loud burping noise comming from the direction of a supermassive black hole.
When Black Holes Attack!
Ideology is for ideots.
Thanks to Darl McBride, executives have the first strong evidence of IBM ripping apart SCO and consuming a portion of it. The event had long been predicted by theory, but never confirmed.
lexbaby
"Be Brave, Be Loyal, Be True." -- Hawkeye Pierce
Well, some day we'll find alien life, although I doubt it will be much like SF showed it to be.
Most likely it will be a robot to make 'first contact' with an alien instead of Captian Kirk.
IMHO I think space exploration is going to be a robot-only job for the forseable future. I doubt manned mission are going to be more than a show than a real important part of the exploration*. At least not until we've developed a better space access (space elevator perhaps).
* I mean the exploration of space, not the development of space technology. Manned space missions will be valuable for developing the tech needed for colonies and space stations.
Big deal. I could do this in my garage. A pair of pliers, some PVC pipe, and roll of duck tape.
This isn't news.
Any evidence of gravity waves from this? If "gravity waves" do travel at C, this is a good way to see them.
Or do we have to be outside the solar system to observe them?
I got some of the images. The speed is getting really slow now (~ 3 KB/s) here. Mirroring is welcomed ;)
Blue 5 in corner pocket.
I'm a subscriber too, "buddy", so don't try to fool me. Why don't you just learn to cope with the fact that you post at -1 and get a friggin life?
Pres. Bush announced today that the US will be the first to land on the black hole. "my fellow americans, it is imperitive that America stand on the forefront of space exploration" Mr. Dean immediately volunteered for the job saying "and we're gonna go to the moon, and mars, and europa and planet X, and then all the way to the black hole! YEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!"
this is fucking stupid
i have a P8D in physics and i could show you a proof proving that this is not true
it involves numbers that carnt be expressed on a regular keyboard so i wont bother. you probably wouldnt understand anyway
jimdo
~carnt afford account so im signing this
After eating half a star does anyone suppose the Maitre D said "And finally, monsieur, a wafer-thin mint" to the black hole?
This is not the sig you're looking for
Your fly's open.
Physicists at may soon be manufacturing copious quantities of black holes. When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, is completed in 2005, it could produce a black hole every second.
These tiny, fleeting phenomena might just give researchers a long-sought glimpse of the hidden dimensions of space.
This development of Black Holes on the planet poses big questions about the dangers and risks involved in handling Black Holes. If one gets out of control, it could potentially "eat" through our planet in no time.
This story has been getting a lot of attention on other time-travel/astronomy related sites, supposedly because people think it was predicted by a time traveller (do a google search). Just some food for thought.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
This is great news for both NASA and the Bush administration, as they have now located their first Weapon of Mass Destruction.
Oh... false alarm.... wrong type of mass...
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
No, they didn't. Get a life already, Vallon.
We don't need these old, damn-near useless satellites.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
but what a ride!
If a black hole is so powerful, that nothing, not even light, can escape it, how exactly do the X-Rays that are emitted from the center of them escape? (Since this is the tell tale sign they look for to find black holes...)
The phenomenon is termed "large-amplitude X-ray variability." It appears that they've finally advanced their models and observation techniques to the point where they are willing to state publicly that this is indeed caused by a black hole. But it's been suspected for years and years.
Mods on crack?
It's amazing, everyone is so excited at the proof that one day, the universe will collapse and we will all die. Or that we may be sucked into one of these things.. Yippie!!! It's like the Los Almos guys being excited about creating a nuclear bomb...
I seem to recall that there are theories about how a black hole devours a star, that accelerating ions spiraling inward do emit X-rays.
Also, something about polar jets of material getting expelled.
Any evidence of those theories applying, for those of you that know?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
...I always pictured Hulk Hogan ripping the star apart.
The gravitational patterns around a black hole are like that of a star until you get very close to it. Just imagine what would happen if a star passed within the planetary space of the Sun. All the planetary orbits would be perturbed. Earth would probably freeze or burn.
If by some astronomical chance the Earth collided with this black hole the planet would be torn apart first by the differential effect of gravity from the black hole. As an object gets closer to a massive gravity sink it orbits more and more quickly, so the close part of the Earth would be torn from the far part. This process would continue until nothing but gas and sand was left.
Then this material would rub against itself while orbiting the black hole at high speed, giving off all kinds of EM energy. Eventually the orbits of this debris would decay and would slip inside the event horizon. The contents of that sphere cannot be explained by physics.
So to answer your question, I think what would probably happen is that first most people would die of starvation as all plants die from the extreme heat/cold. Then most of the remaining survivors would die of asphyxiation as the atmosphere gets ripped off the planet. Then if anyone was left they would be ripped into a fog of dead cells.
But the bright side is we would probably have plenty of time since we would almost certainly detect a black hole years before it contacted our system. We would see the perturbations caused by its gravity, and black holes cause all kinds of interesting EM radiation when they get close to matter.
The same thing happened to Kurt Cobain
"If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments." Earl Wilson
... sounds like it could be from the Calcutta Bollywood gossip page.
Pleez. It cawses fisical pane too sea sutch simpel speling erors.
Anyway, it is great news! I've always loved the theory of black holes... what happens when gravity becomes such that light cannot even escape?
I'm still waiting to find out...
This is the reason why Stephen Hawking is so famous. The theory is his baby.
Black holes evaporate as a result of the fact that quantum theory allows particles to be created near the boundary of the black hole. Particles are created in pairs (particle + antiparticle) and they normally annihilate one another when created in this way. However on the edge of a black hole, one particle may fall in whilst the other is then free to escape.
IANAP (anyone with a physics/ astronomy degree is free to expand/ correct outright lies in the above)
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
don't know where you got that info from....no other TT erased it....reference?
Black holes, White Star, Ripping?
There's a superbowl joke in there somewhere, but I'm not touching it with anything...
Supermassive /. traffic ripped apart a Chandra server and consumed a portion of it.
What that black hole did to that star was just plain wrong!
Did you see that? That star rolled-up on that black hole, but that black hole wasn't messing aroung. It straight-up punked that star!
Let this be a lesson to stars everywhere: you better think twice before rolling up on some black hole's turf. Word.
A black hole really sux!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Black ? Ripping? Star? I saw it before.
:wq
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040218/D80PREA80 .html
includes "illustration"
If Stephen Hawking is wrong (and the black holes do not evaporate) this could literally be the end of us all. This strikes me as at least as dangerous as the first thermonuclear explosion (in which scientist thought there was a small, but real, chance of igniting the atmosphere and literally roasting everyone and everything on the planet. IIRC it was something like 2% odds
I'm no fan of Luddites who want to ban genetic research, GM foods sight unseen irrespective of the details, research into nano-technology, etc. but producing black holes on the surface of our planet without knowing for certain whether or not they will evaporate?
Fuck.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I'm definately not an astronomer but I recall that the theory of there being a supermassive black hole at the center of each galaxy made a hell of alot of sense when last I saw it presented on Discovery or somesuch. Anyone out there know the status on that theory, and if this particular blackhole that's munching the star is a (struggles for terms then makes some up) galaxy-center-hole or a free-floating-hole?
Jonah Hex
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
i thought black holes were not proven to exist, or am i living in the past?
It depends on what one means by "exist," I suppose.
The phenomenological data supports the existence of black holes, very clearly and without controversy. But what "exists" within the event horizon (the radius at which the gravitational force equals the speed of light) of the object we call a black hole is unobservable, and cannot be described by standard models.
Consider that the time dilation at the event horizon is "infinite" according to relativity, thus an infalling particle would require infinite time to cross this boundary. On the other hand, the lifespan of the "black hole" is, according to Hawking, finite. Thus, the event horizon would evaporate before the particle crossed it.
Alternately, the particle might "quantum jump" across the event horizon, this was suggested to me by Dr. Michael Shara at the Space Telescope Science Institute (Johns Hopkins) about 15 years ago. If he's right, black holes may indeed exist.
Or, the particle might be negated by a Hawking anti-particle before it crosses the event horizon.
Finally, the particle might only cross the event horizon when it evaporates, which is to say, if and when the black hole becomes a white hole.
Peace and love, y'all
All the sites seem to be slow, and the Chandra site seems to be down, so I have put up some mirrors.
Chandra article mirror here.
NASA article mirror here.
Picture of rxj1242 is here.
Vote for a Man, Vote for Bush!
Not a liberatarian flipflop hippie.
I am so glad it was pointed out that the image was an illustration. First I was concerned about the big arrow looking object, and immediately there after I began to lose sleep dreaming of the physics behind the black hole corona effect, which shifted into a lazy pondering of the perfect perspective the picture offered us. We should pray, it looks like God is hungry.
Jeoin
-----
Create a WAP server
At least not until we've developed a better space access (space elevator perhaps).
It's already been done. You'll need a gold ticket for a ride in the glass elevator.
That's pretty much what's happening, except (for the picky bastards out there):
Even as you read this, your pants are strangling your loins! Aaa!
In related news, star Michael Jackson was observed ripping a white hole apart...
Most of you guys may not realize why I am smiling to myself. "Chandra sees blackhole rip something-or-other apart" to me sounds like "The Moon sees blackhole rip something-or-other...".
Chandra = Moon. and please dont pronounce it as "shaandddraa", its "chan" (as in jakie chan)+"dra" (as in "drape")
shaaandra sounds ridiculous, retarted and painful to my Indian ears.
screaming about Janet Jackson's left boob
Those screaming about her left boob, which was the one left covered, were not social conservatives, but rather the strip club crowd.
700 million years ago that event pumped out a lot of x-rays. I wondered what that "felt like" out in the periphery. The NASA press release actually answered my question:
"The odds stellar tidal disruption will happen in a typical galaxy are low, about one in 10,000 annually. If it happened at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, 25,000 light-years from Earth, the resulting X-ray outburst would be about 50,000 times brighter than the brightest X-ray source in our galaxy, beside the sun, but it would not pose a threat to Earth."
John Faughnan
jfaughnan@spamcop.net
Not directly related, but it is conceivable that tiny black holes impact earth regularly without much effect. Perhaps they leave a small seismic signature, but that's about it.
Article on linear seismic events
It just occured to me that X-Ray telescopes should be capable of very fine resolution. Consider: resolution is directly proportional to the arpature and inversely to the wavelength. Or, to put it a different way, directly proportional to the arpature measured in wavelengths. This is why radio telescopes have such poor resolution. Now, X-Rays are of a higher frequency and (naturally) lower wavelength than visible light. Wouldn't that mean that for a given instrument you'd get better resolution?
Good, inexpensive web hosting
It wasn't a black hole - it was the Cookie Monster.
When I was a lad black holes ripped bloody galaxies apart not like these pussy-faced star sucking buggers...
I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born - Ronald Reagan
"Giant Black Hole Rips Apart Unlucky Star In Cosmic Reality Show" Why does everything have to be like american idol?, although it would be better if losing contestants were ripped apart. Maybe american idol should start trying to be more like a black hole for stupid wouldbe teen popstars.
While perusing the other images Chandra has sent back I came across what appears to be a "Quicktime" supernova. Forget about NASA releasing their software, Apple's seems to already have the ability to manipulate Magellanic Clouds!
He didn't say "the contents of the event horizon." He said "the contents of that sphere," as in, the three-dimensional "volume" bounded by the event horizon. In space-time, of course, a black hole's gravity sink is not a sphere but an (infinitely deep? asymptotically deep?) sloped well.
His point was that disposition of the mass and information that falls into a black hole is not explainable by the laws of physics operative outside the hole in normal space-time. Theoretically, as you note, all that matter may simply stop in the form of a sphere, but if that's true it will not be at the event horizon, the radius beyond which nothing can escape the hole's gravity, but within it, at that radius where the relativity equations cease to be useful. And that's really the real question; the shell idea is just that, one idea, and all sorts of questions are posed by the potential loss of information as matter enters a hole, and in what form it "exists" while it's "in" "there."
Hawking Radiation, on the other hand, really has nothing to do with what falls into (or does not fall into) a black hole, and where that stuff all ends up and in what form. The radiation Hawking predicted (it has yet to be observationally verified, if it ever will be) arises from the formation of particles from vacuum energy near the event horizon, as you describe. But what really goes on within the event horizon, whether information is preserved in there... these questions are the interesting ones, and they don't yet have answers.
Actually you're definition of a blackhole is a bit off.
Every object has a point at which gravity is so intense that light cannot escape it. This is called the schwarzschild radius. However, black holes are unique in that their radius lies OUTSIDE the object, whereas every non-black hole object's radius lies INSIDE the object.
The earth, even you or I have this radius too. For the earth however it is underground; were you to attempt to approach it (by digging down for instance) gravitational force would decrease as you decsended. As this force decreases the schwarzschild radius would decrease as a result. Thus you would never be able to reach the schwarzschild radius of the earth because it would always be receeding from you the closer you approached it.
What would happen if two black holes came into close proximity of each other? I don't have enough knowledge about black holes to hypothesize, maybe some of you guys with more background on the subject could shed some light?
The one time where a soviet russia joke makes sense... and no one mods it up.
This telescope is named for the physicist Chandrashekar who got noble prize in physics. Dr Chandra of Space Odyssey:20?? was also based on this bloke(though he was a computer scientist). Truly an American icon.
First Dr. Chandra gets to train HAL, then SAL. Then he gets to spacewalk above Jupiter. Now, he sees a black hole take on a star. I'm just a little jealous.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
first janet jackson ripped by justin timberlake and now this! what is this universe coming to!!
I happen to know the black hole personally, and he told me with a certain degree of sympathy that the star in question told the black hole, "I sure could go for a bite about now." Being the kind individual the black-hole is, he took the matter into his own hands, or... mouth.
Learn something new.
Still, pretty scary stuff, if you live nearby.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It will be a tremendous shame to lose Hubble. But one can guess that Bush bought NASA off with the: Forget about Hubble and the Space Station (and our commitment to the Russkies), you will get $$B$$ with the Moon/Mars plan/ploy. And I'll get re-election points and more space/military spending.
So, good for Chandra. But we won't forget Hubble...
Of course it isn't a unicorn. It's a giant space goat.
(Hey! Stop that! No goatse links!)
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
...astronomers have the first strong evidence of a supermassive black hole ripping apart a star and consuming a portion of it with some fava beans and a nice Chianti...
Small correction (before I get flamed)... black holes don't allow time travel. Rather wormholes do (wormholes are two black holes connected together)... also, it is not clear if time travel is allowed by the laws of science
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Picture of the Black Hole
Picture of the Black Hole
..whilst wrong about the source of X-rays (sorry), the post is still interesting and informative extra information about black holes for those too lazy to use google to look around, and should be modded up accordingly (not that I give a damn, I suspect that if I posted flamebait for the next two years my karma would still be Excellent)
The post is factual and should be rated above a 1. Probably doesn't merit a 5, but somewhere inbetween is fine.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
you are mistaking. "Laws" are just parts of theories that allow predictions. Laws are consideres valid as long as the observations are consistent with the predictions. You can not prove that a law is correct (how would you do that?), you can only a) (mathematically) show ("prove") that a low is *consistent* with some other law/theory -- you can not prove that it is "correct" as a representation of "reality" under all circumstances. You can only say that so far, we have not observed anything that violates a proposed law. In fact, manny of the "laws" of physics have already been shown to be not "entirely" true, i.e. the depend on surten simplifications: Conservation of Mass (and of Energy) for instance is only "correct" (i.e. consisten with observation), als long as we do not take into account the possibility of converting mass to energy (and vice versa), following the well known formula of E=MC^2: Atomic fission actually *destroys* mass. Now, folowing Einstein, we could say that the product of mass and energy in the universe is constant. But we can't be sure that that is really true -- we can only say that it "looks like that".
Again: a scientific statement is by definition a statement that could (in theory) be disproven by contrary observation. Stating an "irrefutable fact" is, again by definition, unscientific (see for a start the works of Karl Popper). Thus there is no absolute known "truth" in any science. All we can "prove" is the consistency of different sets of rules, according to yet another set of rules (arithmetics, logic, etc). That's where math comes in: in showing consistency. But it doesn't tell us anything about "reality".
Face it: science is not about "knowing what's really going on". It's just about producing "good guesses" about expected effects. Math is an exception here: it does not even try to tell us anything about reality, it works entirely on trying to show consequences and consistencies according to specific sets of rules and axioms (which are called "theories" or "calculus" (in the broader sense)).
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this 120 chars is too small to contain.
Hehe... while reading user comments, I also heard it on the local news here in Austria: "The phenomena is taking place some [insert insane number of light years] away, meaning that our Sun is outside of the danger zone".
:-)
Gee, I'm feeling better now!
Is "dwarf star" still PC?
Or should we call it "Volumetrically Challenged"?
How dare he mock us?! Come on, Slashdotters. RTFA for once in your life!! Wipe out his webserver!!!
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Seeing how easily that star was ripped apart (albeit as an artist's animation) made me think of what it must have been like for any life living on a planet orbiting that star.
Especially any sentient, self-aware, intelligent life.
Makes you wonder if that will ever happen to our star.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
The quote at the bottom of the page:
When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. -- Samuel Johnson
Alternative:
When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully, motherfucker! -- Samuel Jackson
We have no idea whether CERN is "on the verge" of producing black holes. It's only possible if certain very speculative ideas about extra dimensions are true. There are no theories that suggest that large extra dimensions are likely to exist, even string theory. (String theory permits large extra dimensions, but doesn't predict them; the only reason such scenarios are currently popular is because we might be able to test them, not because they're likely to be true.)
Observations like these are urgently needed to determine how quickly black holes can grow by swallowing neighboring stars.
I don't like the sound of that... why would anyone need to know how fast black holes can grow?
something "you read" about Hawking radiation hasn't been proved. moreover, you're being redundant..one of the earlier replies to this thread already pointed it out. please read before adding ignorant/redundant comments
QM doesn't negate the invokation of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. QM gives a mechanism (tunnelling of particles) by which entropy can still increase. Given this mechanism, the 2nd Law simply implies that this mechanism will be used.
Wikileaks, no DNS