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."

Comments

This was already speculated

[Peter Cooper]

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.

You know what would be cool?

[Otto]

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. :)