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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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
In a twist, this time it was the hole tearing a new one.
God Bless America. Why? Did it sneeze?
A radio telescope has captured a wave pattern of a loud burping noise comming from the direction of a supermassive black hole.
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
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?
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
Here's an interesting site (google cache) about black holes. I'm not sure how long it would take, but to an outside observer, it would seem like forever, relatively speaking. :)
Tech News, Reviews and Tutorials
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."
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.
The X-rays are not emitted from the center. They are emitted from outside the event horizon by hot gas (millions of degrees) orbiting at huge velocities. Centrifugal force spins the gas out into an "accretion disk" and superheats it as it slowly spirals into the black hole.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
you are simply wrong.
1. "our" understanding is that any massive particle travelling at less than the speed of light (in a vacuum) cannot be accelerated up to the speed of light. [it is possible (but AFAIK all attempts to detect have given a null result) that faster-than-light particles (tachyons) exist, but they would be created with speeds > light in the first place.]
2. in certain x-ray experiments you can have x-rays for which both the phase and group speeds are greater than the speed of light. however, they are highly dispersive and so cannot be used for communications. hence the more accurate version of your statement is "information cannot travel faster than the speed of light".
3. in the quantum-mechanical view, light travels from A to B with all speeds and along all paths, however the different paths interfere destructively such that the most probable path by far is in a straight line at speed c. the effect of these different paths is seen in interference experiments, most famously Young's double-slit experiment.
no I didn't see that particular story, I guess I was too busy actually *doing* physics.
dark matter isn't actually the basis of many theories (or at least not any good ones), it itself is a theory to account for observations.
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?