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.

Comments

Text-only version

[after]

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.

Doesn't work that way

[GunFodder]

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.

Do Black Holes exist?

[whig]

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.

More mirrors

[Temporal Outcast]

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.

Re:Great results from the great X-ray telescopes

[mbrother]

I'm talking primarily about the resolution (Chandra resolution is 0.5 arcseconds, ROSAT resolution like 50 arcseconds). XMM also has a huge improvement in collecting area which may be something like 100 times better sensitivity, at least for harder energies, but I'd have to look up the numbers for a quantitative comparison. I think it's fair to say in general that the new X-ray telescopes are a couple of orders of magnitude "better" (in terms of resolution and sensitivity) than the previous generation of X-ray telescopes like ROSAT. Not to denigrate ROSAT, which was great for its time and produced wonderful science.