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Chandra Sees Black Hole Rip Star Apart

Posted by timothy on from the justin-timberlake-did-it dept.

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.

28 of 332 comments (clear)

  1. Cheers by after · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Cheers by EverDense · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Black & white, is it?

      Our "understanding" of physics also says that faster than light travel is impossible.

      We no this is false, otherwise Star Wars is a complete fabrication. :-P

      Did you notice the story here a little while ago, about the fact that all that "dark matter" that has been the basis of many a theory, may not even exist?

      (not that I think black holes don't exist)

      --
      http://jesus.everdense.com/
  2. Great results from the great X-ray telescopes by mbrother · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)
    1. Re:Great results from the great X-ray telescopes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      How is $.94 five times less than $.99, no matter what unit you use? It's not. It's five units less, not five times less. That's assuming you meant to use $.01 as a unit and not $1.00, in which case it would be $.05 units - not times - less.

      Why don't you just go on the assumption that most of the rest of the known universe will make when reading this: that "100 times worse" is not a specific measurement, but simply implies a significant difference in quality.

    2. Re:Great results from the great X-ray telescopes by Celandine · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The ROSAT HRI was nothing like as bad as 50 arcsec -- more like 5, depending on what exactly you're measuring (FWHM? 50% enclosed energy? etc). The PSPC (the other main imaging instrument on ROSAT, for those of you who aren't keeping up) was a lot worse than that, of course. Chandra is about 4 times more sensitive in the ROSAT band, 0.1-2.4 keV, than the HRI was, in terms of count rates from a soft source, and a little bit more sensitive than the PSPC. XMM (if you measure the raw count rate from all cameras) is about 10 times more sensitive than the PSPC, so if you want to compare XMM to the ROSAT HRI your `two orders of magnitude' is only about half an order of magnitude out. For energies harder than 2.4 keV and less than ~ 8 keV both Chandra and XMM are infinitely more sensitive than ROSAT, so the comparison is hardly fair (-:.

  3. How fast does a Blackhole consume? by fembots · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:How fast does a Blackhole consume? by Dylan+Zimmerman · · Score: 5, Interesting

      To answer those questions, you have to first understand what it is that a black hole is. It isn't some magical thing that eats whatever it touches. It doesn't have infinitely strong gravity.

      It's just a normal piece of matter like any other. The only difference is that a black hole is dense enough that it can catch light.

      Now, as you approach a black hole, time dialation increases and the apparent event horizon of the black hole decreases. Once you hit the Schwarzchild Radius, there is no escape because there's an infinite red shift on anything moving outwards. However, for you, time would still be passing.

      Black holes cause gravitational distortions sort of like shear forces on a bolt. These shear forces can break matter apart quite effectively. If the black hole is small (like a thin metal plate pushing on the bolt), then it might tear a hole in the matter. If the black hole is big (like a REALLY THICK metal plate), it will still eventually tear you apart, but much more regularly. Really, that second case is analogous to pushing a bolt into a block of metal sideways. The force is fairly even all over the bolt.

      Another problem with the time dialation is that a small enough black hole (with an event horizon say, the size of a pea) would cause things to age differently. Put it near a plate of steel and the steel closest to it would age significantly more slowly than the steel at the edge of the plate.

      To answer your first question, if a black hole was coming to devour us, it would take quite a while as percieved by us, the devoured. The second question is quite different. We would certainly be able to notice a black hole coming to devour us. X-Rays would probably be the best indicator, since black holes are quite powerful X-Ray sources.

      And last, the third question. I don't really know. With a planet-sized or smaller black hole, I would expect the Earth to tear itself apart as the rotational inertia of the side away from the black hole would cause great internal stresses on the Earth. With a large enough black hole, it probably wouldn't be too noticible at all for quite a while. Again, internal stresses would eventually break the Earth apart. However, that would have to be one FREAKISHLY huge black hole. We're talking larger than most stars, here. If the black hole is tiny, it would rip a hole through things, but the Earth might remain intact. It all depends on mass.

      If I'm wrong here, somebody please correct me.

  4. Re:Someone lives in the black hole..... by Patrik_AKA_RedX · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  5. Is there.. by Creepy+Crawler · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    --
    1. Re:Is there.. by forand · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Currently we do not have any Gravity wave detectors that could observe this, as stated in another reply LIGO could not observe this, nor pretty much anything short of something really strong happening within a VERY close range. We have not observed any gravity waves directly, however we have seen that rotation periods of certian large bodies indicate that energy is escaping the system beyond that predicted by hawking radiation, which is consistent with gravity waves carring said energy away. Hope this helps.

  6. Blackholes and Time Travel by GillBates0 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    For those of you interested in the implications of Black holes on higher dimensions and time travel, CERN is on the verge of producing a large number of black holes at their Large Hadron Collider.

    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
    1. Re:Blackholes and Time Travel by ImprovOmega · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Note: IANAP(hysicist)

      From a thought experiment point of view, a teeny-tiny black hole would have an event horizon (the point of no return so to speak) with a vanishingly small radius, as subatomic particles come into contact with it, it eats those, then it eats more and more of them until it's eating atoms, then...and so on.
      It is worth noting that black holes, being 0-dimensional points, have infinite density and would (absent an electromagnetic field of some kind) fall straight into the earth's core, and in our little thought experiment, eventually eat the earth from the inside out. However:

      A bit of googling turns up the following link:

      http://www.alcyone.com/max/writing/essays/black- ho le-evaporation.html

      which shows that a black hole evaporates over an amount of time proportional to it's mass cubed. Let's assume they make a black hole that weighs 1kg, then

      tau=c^2/(3*(3.563*10^32)) * (1kg)^3
      tau=8.4198*10^(-17) seconds

      which is not long enough to worry about by any means =)

    2. Re:Blackholes and Time Travel by Ralph+Spoilsport · · Score: 4, Interesting
      ...not to be a total grouch, but all of this is assuming that Hawking is correct. We have no proof this is so.

      There is a non-zero probability that one of these blackholes could eat a particle, then another and another and the next thing you know: poof. In a few weeks the moon will orbit a black hole.

      Now, let's see - we have no tests for evaporating black holes, and some geek in Switzerland thinks it's a good idea to do it here on earth. It is likely that Hawking is *probably* correct. But if he's not, we could be TOTALLY fucked. Personally, I'm putting my money on Hawking, but frankly I find this kind of work a bit unnerving. The only justice would be that the first to get ripped into quantal goo would be the dorks at CERN.

      All the more reason for a moon base, IMHO.

      The moonbased atomsmasher could be powered by He3 fusion - right on site. although, if the moon disappeared into a blackhole, we'd get fried by the radiation anyway. Hmmmm.

      All the more reason for a Mars Base, IMHO...

      This way, if Mars gets eaten by a homegrown Blackhole, we'll be less likely to be nuked by the results. Maybe. Aaaaah - nemmind. When the ring gets vapourised by an errant blackhole, the Swiss geeks will say "MEIN GOTT!" just as they are vapourised. Good 'nuff. This sentient life thing was such a crap shoot from the start, anyway.

      RS

      --
      Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
    3. Re:Blackholes and Time Travel by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Actually, scientists didn't fully understand what would happen during a nuclear reaction the first time around. There were some fears that the reaction could run away and consume all matter on Earth in an atom splitting orgy. They decided to set one off anyway and find out.

    4. Re:Blackholes and Time Travel by shadowbearer · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The only justice would be that the first to get ripped into quantal goo would be the dorks at CERN.

      No, if a quantum black hole created by the collider did (insert miracle here) manage to survive long enough to start eating atoms, it would, fairly rapidly, drop (well, orbit) to the center of the earth (where it would find higher densities and a lot more to eat). Remember that it's not going to interact with matter much at all at first, so essentially the only force acting on it then would be gravity (the earth's).

      It would grow extremely slowly, at first, so it's likely that nobody would notice anything for quite a while - especially given how hard it would be to keep track of the thing in the first place. However, the last few days/weeks of the earth's existence would be quite, um, interesting :) as the accretion accelerated....

      SB

      --
      It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
    5. Re:Blackholes and Time Travel by dwighteb · · Score: 2, Interesting
      There is a non-zero probability that one of these blackholes could eat a particle, then another and another and the next thing you know: poof. In a few weeks the moon will orbit a black hole.

      Ok - first of all, the gravitational effect from these black holes would be small - since, well, they're being made by particles from earth, their gravitational effect on the surrounding environment would be about the same as however much matter was compressed down to form the particular black hole. Also, note that the radius is is much smaller than than the nucleus of an atom.

      Now, since the gravitational effect of these mini holes is neglible, compared to the earth's, they won't go sucking all the matter around them like a vacuum cleaner. If they aren't totally unstable, as predicted by Hawking, and they linger, their effects will be small. Think about it - they will either fall inward towards the earth's core, and occasionaly eat some particles, or they will fly out in to space, eating an occasional particle.

      Remember - matter here on earth is made up of mostly empty space - if we took a carbon nucleus, and expanded it to the size of a football field, then placed it in the center of the earth, the electrons would be orbiting at the earth's surface. There is a _lot_ of empty space for these mini black holes to travel through - never mind the relative distances between molecules.

      All the more reason for a Mars Base, IMHO...

      Having said all this, I do agree with you on the Mars base. I personally doubt these mini black holes will have a catasrophic effect, but of course I can't prove it.

  7. Don't be so happy! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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...

  8. Match with Theory? by 4of12 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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."
  9. Quantum theory produces weird effects by maroberts · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:Quantum theory produces weird effects by pclminion · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Hawking radiation is a real phenomenon, but that's not what is happening here. The amount of Hawking radiation actually decreases as a black hole gets bigger. A black hole of this scale -- 100 million times the Sun's mass -- is going to be emitting essentially no Hawking radiation.

      As I said in another reply, the X-rays are emitted from superhot gas spiraling around the black hole. Your description of the Hawking radiation theory is (mostly) correct, however. Virtual particles are constantly created/annihilated all throughout space, not just near black holes.

  10. Re:Doesn't work that way by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The contents of the event horizon can indeed be explained by physics. Read up on your Hawking. He talks about electrons and positrons spontaneously forming and being destroyed and how a certain percentage of them form with one of the pair inside and the other outside such that the black hole loses mass.

    Also, a while ago, there was a physicicst who proposed that just inside the event horizon, where time dialation goes to infinity, a sort of shell of matter forms. This shell expands and contracts with the black hole and as you near the black hole, the event horizon seems to recede.

    Anyway, given a long enough time, Hawking Radiation will cause a black hole to 'evaporate', as it were. It loses more and more mass until it simply doesn't have enough to hold everything else in anymore. Of course, this is on an astronomical time scale, and as such may take longer than the expected lifespan of the universe, but In theory, it will eventually happen.

  11. This is a funny headline. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

  12. Re:Supermassive Black Holes & Galaxies by mbrother · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Hey Jonah Hex was a favorite comic of mine! On topic, yes, the theory that every massive galaxy hosts a massive black hole at its core is in fine shape. Observations, particularly from the Hubble Space Telescope, continue to offer strong support for this idea to the level that we can now make good estimates of the black hole mass just from looking at the galaxy. In this case we are indeed talking about a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy rather than a stellar-sized black hole. And I'm not sure I'd say "free-floating hole" in mixed company. Stars are so small anyway that stellar collisions essentially never happen in a galaxy, and the cross-section for a black hole is really the same as a star.

    --
    Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
  13. Re:Supermassive Black Holes & Galaxies by Celandine · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It is. Anyone who hasn't seen the movies of stars orbiting around the (presumed) black hole (3 million solar masses in a tiny volume) at the centre of our own galaxy should go here or here right now.

  14. My question is.... by SecretSauce · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  15. Hubble ? eh ? Hey lookie over here: Chandra... by neurocutie · · Score: 1, Interesting
    Chandra's great and all but my cynical self first thought upon seeing this NASA PR was: DIVERSION, get the public to forget about Hubble. Remind them that we still have Chandra (of course Chandra is an XRAY telescope, but what's a few angstroms between friends (or to the dumb public)?).

    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...

  16. Re:Better headline. by ChandraWebAdmin · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Chandra webserver yawns at slashdot's meager attempts. The bulk of our traffic is coming from yahoo news. And while I admit that there were a couple of configuration issues that were brought to my attention earlier, they've been resolved, and things are humming along nicely. Traffic peaked between 8 and 9 (eastern) with over a million hits in that hour.

    If you want the details, we had compiled apache for up to 2048 clients, but had left maxclients set to a meager 512, which caused some problems up until about 7pm eastern, when I bumped maxclients to 1536, and watched as actual connections peaked up around 900. We also had an errant script that was "gracefully" restarting the web server every 15 minutes, which boosted the load up to around 20 (the server actually didn't seem to mind). Fixed that quick.

    The server, by the way is a SunFire 280R (dual 750 MHz) with 4G memory, attached by 100Mbit ethernet (from us to Harvard is gigabit, and from Harvard to the world is something really big). Once the errant script was stopped, load was steady around 1.9 (and I now also realize that there was an incremental backup in progress since about 6pm).

    To paraphrase Kirk:
    "I'm laughing at your superior network."

  17. Re:/dev/null by dclydew · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I once spoke to a christian, I asked him why he believed in God, the Bible and Hell... he told me:

    "The Church knows a lot more about the subject than I do, I tend to simply accept their beliefs on such matters."

    I once spoke to a suicide bomber, I asked him why he thought he would go to Heaven by killing... He told me:

    "Our leaders knows a lot more about the subject than I do, I tend to simply accept their beliefs on such matters."

    I once spoke to a Jehovah's Witness, living in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. I asked him why he wouldn't say Heil Hitler and gain his freedom... He said:

    "The Watchtower knows a lot more about the subject than I do, I tend to simply accept their beliefs on such matters."

    I asked the Roman who was nailing Jeshua bin Joseph to a crucifix, I asked the apostles who were killed for following him, I asked the followers of Do, Jim Jones and David Koresh why they were willing to act in such strange ways... they all replied them same.

    I looked out over the world and cried from the mountaintop: "Why? Why do you follow other men who are just as prone to mistakes as you? Why do you simply believe what someone tells you? Why do you think any of us really know the answers?

    Then they came to my mountain, the Christian, the Jew, the Muslim, the Catholic and the Protestant, the Nazi, the Religous Right, the Scientest, the Physist and the Doctor. For I had attacked the one thing that they all believe in. Like an army they marched toward me, then crying havoc they let slip the War of Dogma.

    (The above is a metaphor... but then maybe everything else is as well)

    --
    Get a life, not a lifestyle. - Hikem Bey