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First Science From A Virtual Observatory
mindpixel writes "I first mentioned Virtual Observatories in my July 2000 Slashdot interview. Now, nearly four years later, Spacetelescope.org is reporting a European team has used the Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (AVO) to find 30 supermassive black holes that had previously escaped detection behind masking dust clouds. The identification of this large population of long-sought 'hidden' black holes is the first scientific discovery to emerge from a Virtual Observatory. The result suggests that astronomers may have underestimated the number of powerful supermassive black holes by as much as a factor of five."
Could this by any chance have anything to do with the Dark Energy "antigravity" effect that the universe appears to be experiencing? One would think that the black holes would actually help things collapse, but if they're at the outer fringes, might they be pulling things outward?
Hmm... probably a stupid question, but it never hurts to ask.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Great, just what the OS community needed, more black holes.
There goes my plans for deep space exploration... I don't mess around with black holes.
It's a frickin' database!!
The result suggests that astronomers may have underestimated the number of powerful supermassive black holes by as much as a factor of five
AMAZING!
The fact that we as a community can see and "Learn" in what is almost real-time...incredible.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. -- Hunter S. Thompson
The majority of the sources are so faint that it is currently not possible to take spectra of them and the VO techniques made it possible for the researchers to work seamlessly with images and catalogues from many different sources
One question the AVO may answer is, in this view how do these black holes produce X-ray sources, similar to what we see from galaxies that are much younger?
And (OT) is it just me or does that background hurt your eyes too?
Sigs cause cancer.
Are any close enough to toss SCO into?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Sounds like I need one for when I clean my apartment out. Do you do overnight delivery?
The identification of this large population of long-sought 'hidden' black holes is the first scientific discovery to emerge from a Virtual Observatory
:-) Just made me wonder who is good enough to pull a joke like that on "us".
While not entirely a SETI oriented comment or question, I guess I was just wondering/typing out loud...Remember the Dinosaur?
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. -- Hunter S. Thompson
I don't think this accounts for dark matter, but it may shed some light on one of the world's oldest questions, immortalized by the great Ray Stevens: "Where do my socks go when I put them in the dryer?"
It's official: The Universe Sucks! :D
(Couldn't help it)
And I quote, from Science Frontiers in March 1988 in a story about black holes: "The long history of science teaches us that all theories are eventually displaced by more accurate, more all-inclusive formulations." The observations made in the virtual observatory may allow the incredible boffins to establish the aforementioned formulations.
Further: Among the observations that hint at the reality of black holes are the X-ray binaries. In a typical X-ray binary, prodigious, flickering fluxes of X-rays reveal the presence of an ultradense star and an orbiting companion. The rapid orbital motion of the companion star tells us that the central X-ray star has a mass of more than three suns. General Relativity assures us that such a star can only collapse further to form a black hole. Therefore, black holes must exist.
However, this speculation may merely be an accessory to a grotesque mythology surrounding the aforementioned black holes. Some people in the scientific community believe that black holes were invented by more advanced civilizations in order to act as a cloaking device for their areas of space.
I am personally of the belief that black holes do not exist, as they suffer from the 'tree falling in the forest' syndrome. If you cannot see it, it does not exist. This applies to everything. So if you wish to exist, please reply to my diatribe.. alternatively, if you haven't even read this far, mod me up as Insightful or Informative.
To take this massive amount of sky image data and to build one freakin' huge database of it all. Take all this raw data, cut it into chunks, index it in a huge database, then have a system to display any part of it combined from all or some of the sources. Like a virtual sky sort of thing.
:)
The data storage would obviously have to be immense, as would the indexing and graphics processing capabilities.
Anyway, then make a virtual sky out of it. So that you can look at any place in the database, get your image in a variety of views, look at the original images, look at it in ultraviolet, IR, whatever you like.
Some system for processing incoming data would be needed, some method to sync data from multiple sources, etc, etc. But it would be pretty useful, I think. At least to astronomers.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Just the light you personally observe, or would any light do?
DNA just wants to be free...
So the tracking system in the Mid-East, which found out where airplanes were by discovering where cellphone signals *weren't* transiting, proves that that point in space doesn't really exist, as it couldn't be observed? It seems to me that as much can be learned from what we don't observe but expect to, as can be learned from what we do observe. What is observed about these "non points" in space where the black holes exist is that there is a location in space-time that does not conform to our laws of physics if indeed there is nothing there.
Our laws of physics, particularly when your talking about something non-terrestrial are bit too shaky to assume anything based on what we expect to see and don't, wouldn't you say?
Oh, well!
No matter.
Not to mention that practically every biology paper involving a molecular sequence includes a search against GenBank, a database of all publicly available sequences started in 1982. Database-based science is nothing new in biology, but we don't call it "virtual sequence hybridization" or some such thing, although database searches have replaced a lot of experimental approaches to sequence similarity measures.
30 supermassive black holes that had previously escaped detection behind masked dust bunnies.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
we're using laboratories which don't physically exist to detect things we can't actually see...
hmmm...... somehow this seems like a perverse application of a double negative.
...and free software to do data reduction and analysis. Most of it is esoteric and somewhat unintuitive to use, but if you want you can get access to year old observations from
That's exactly what some students chose to do in the internet-taught (distance education) astronomy masters I did a few years ago at the University of Wester Sydney (UWS) in Australia. Unfortunately they've killed off that course but there are courses - online masters degrees and doctorate courses being run out of James Cook University (JCU - http://www.jcu.edu.au) now in QLD Australia. This degree is taught by some of the same staff that created and ran the course at UWS, who left when support for Astronomy by upper management at UWS died in what I consider a disgusting way. They are a good bunch of people, very passionate and highly skilled.
Of course you don't have to do a degree to get hold of the software, and books and try out some reduction yourself. The learning curve is high, but the resources out there on the net for astronomy are amazing.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I'm a student at the University of Cosmotology at Berkley, and I think virtual obervathingies are great!!!
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
RIMMER: But a Black Hole's a huge, compacted star! It's millions of miles wide! Why didn't you see it on the radar screen?
HOLLY: Well, the thing about a Black Hole - it's main distinguishing feature - is it's black. And the thing about space, your basic space colour is black. So how are you s'posed to see them?
RIMMER: But thrity of them! How can you be ambushed by thirty Black Holes?
HOLLY: Always the way, isn't it? You look into Deep Space for years and you don't see one. Then, all of a sudden, thirty all turn up at once.
Modified from Red Dwarf, Series 3, Episode 2 "Marooned"
You don't need a lab to make mud.
Wow, that's the 2nd factor of 5 this week. Does this mean that there are 25x known number of black holes now versus last week?
No dark matter/energy, no confusing theories, new comcepts or new forms of anything. The real reason? All the other galaxies have better telecopes than us. They saw us coming and decided they better make a run for it while they can. :-D
~~ Please keep your arms, legs, and outright stupidity inside the ride at all times. Thank You ~~
It's a search engine, for the most part.
I'm one of the programmers on the Virtual Solar Observatory. The poster I'm presenting today at the American Astronomical Society explains a little bit about what we're trying to accomplish.
The problem is that there are lots of places out there that are making recordings, but not all of the data are being shared with other researchers. Much of the time, it's because people don't know the data is even out there. For instance, if someone finds some odd reading out there, before they go and spend a lot of time on it, if they can compare the data to some other telescope reading at the same time, that's at a different location, they might be able to determine if it was an error on the instrument, as opposed to a legitimate event.
As instruments only point at a fixed region, if you find something on a wide angle picture, you can try to find out if someone else was pointing at the region of interest with a better resolution at that point in time.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
The AVO site is unnavigable without enabling JavaScript. When will people learn? (I guess it could be worse; it could be flash-only.)
. . . with dark energy causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate, it might be more apt to say that "The Universe Blows".
Never eat anything bigger than your head.