Slashdot Mirror
Black Hole Birth Detected this Morning
An anonymous reader writes "SPACE.com is reporting on the first optical afterglow ever detected from a short-duration (milliseconds) Gamma-Ray Burst. The GRB signals the birth of a black hole resulting from a merger between two neutron stars. Theory had predicted the whole thing, which was all spotted this morning by NASA's Swift satellite and ground-based observatories, thanks to an automated email system that notifies astronomers worldwide."
The Gamma ray burst was determined to emitted from a very large cigarette lighter igniting a very, very large cigarette. SETI recorded the first successfully detected extraterrestrial broadcast of a message, which they believe was "Was it good for you, too?" Bachelor and bachelorette scientists around the world are extremely puzzeled and have few clues as to what it all means.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's unclear whether the newborn is a boy or a girl, but what is known is that it has no hair.
Grossest. Dept. Ever.
Dad's a little dazed...
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Is there anything it can't do?
Wasn't there another slashdot article a few weeks ago about how blackholes don't exist? I think it was talking about this report.
They had to tune down their email spam filter to let that one through...
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
No credit card required click for details.
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
What kind of gifts do you get for a super massive object? You don't want to make mom and dad angry, that is for sure.
Philosophy.
will require serious stitching or no star will want to merge with her again.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
The black hole was a noningth of an inch in length and weighed about the same as a large star.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I read somewhere about workers at an Army ammunition plant. A newbie came on, and was being shown around his area of responsibility, when there was a loud metallic CLANG, as some object in the warehouse full of high explosives dropped to the floor. The newbie instinctively dove to the ground has his compatriots chuckled. As he stood back up, they told him, "If you hear it hit the floor, it didn't explode."
Looks like this one was a dud. Lucky much?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I told Rosie O'Donnell not to eat that last HoHo... Looks what she's done now!
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Too bad the Cygnus wasn't there to watch!
Successfully condensing fact from the vapor of nuance since 1998.
It happened 2.2 billion years ago. Slashdot really needs to try and stay current.
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish and he'll wipe out the species.
It probably happened few million years ago. It's history...
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
It was just about a month ago that it was reported that blackholes don't exist.
I wish physicists could make up their mind.
I'm a big tall mofo.
I almost put up a big "Happy Birthday you Big Black Hole" banner at work as a joke, but luckily I found out beforehand that one of my co-workers has a birthday today. I am guessing that banner wouldn't have gone over too well with him.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
"Mr. Scott I need your warp 8 speed now"...."Captain I'm giving you all that I can muster"
How did a gamma ray burst escape the black hole? Sounds contradictory to me.
I call bullshit! Prove me wrong.
Yes, I should be modded -1 sexist.
The Raven
Didn't you mean "theory had predicted the hole thing" ?
... This years intergalactic golf competition has started with a complete revamp of the course including a new hole deep into the galaxy! This looks like a promising season to me, so everyone, get your space-clubs out and try not to hit your little ball into that newly formed gas cloud! Oh, and, we appologize 2.2 billion year delay of "this" years golf magazine from outer space.
Proud owner of BOT2K3 [ bot2k3.net ]
"A fraction of a second before contact, the lower mass neutron star is disrupted and forms a neutrino driven accretion disk around the higher mass neutron star," Sigurdsson told SPACE.com. "It implodes under the weight and forms a maximally spinning low-mass black hole."
Man, this sounds like a big bang going on here.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
You should have heard the mother scream.
Instead of a black hole being created, it could've been a free-falling whale. Just a bunch of kids showing off their hot rods with an Infinite Probability Drive.
The burst has been named GRB050509b
I mean, really! How droll, how clever...
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
Don't Panic!?
Mama neutron star will be telling the Black Hole how many hours she was in labor for the rest of her life...
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Have you READ any of the "Left Behind" series? I only *wish* there weren't people out there like that. Holy moly.
Found it. Donald Coyne of UCSC gave a talk on the Ultimate Fate of Small Black Holes. Be sure to check the Milagro link on his facutly page.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I thought gamma ray bursts and the resulting creation of a black hole were the result of Hyper-Novas not from the merger of two neutron stars.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
Shouldn't this be more appropriately described as a black hole being ripped, rather than being born?
So far these have been the least intelligent responses to scientific matter I believe I have ever see on slashdot. If this were anything related to YRO, linux or windows the people would be busting out certifications & degrees in bunches, but the recorded creation of a blackhole, all we get is poorly constructed sexual innuendo. Fantastic.
that makes makes me glad I'm not an astronomer.
A Gamma-ray burst lasting less than a second from 2.2 billion light years away, followed by an X-ray afterglow (for a few seconds).
Probably a black hole.
Or maybe the civil war on Zebulon III finally escalated to gamma-ray weapons.
But what funding agency would believe that?
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Illudium Q-36: Kaboom!
Marvin
This is nothing new, God was just dividing by zero!
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Wait a second...didn't ROTSE detect an optical afterglow first in 1999?
/a?
ROTSE's first detection of optical afterglow
must have been the microwave burritos
Actually, it was all the extra apostrophes people put in ITS and make plurals with that end up at the end of the universe. They just exceeded the Chandrasekhar limit for apostrophes and imploded this morning.
Hope it doesn't start crying in the night!.
Wait, nothing can left the bh, so I will not be able to hear it!
I want one to put in my baby mouth!
So what is it?
C.f. this Slashdot story from about a month ago where a phycisist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory claims that 'it's a near certainty that black holes don't exist.' Time to eat crow or do his "dark energy stars" exhibit the same behavior as black holes?
I thought it was funny...
I haven't found the answer in any articles yet so I'm wondering if anyone here knows - how bright was the burst? Magnitude or photon flux and wavelength is fine - I'm just wondering how bright this thing was to be seen 2.2 billion lt-yr away!
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
You forgot to mention the "Left Behind" series....
Great. Now it really is starting to feel like the universe is just one big version of Conway's Game of Life?
"You have liberated me from thought."
It has all the earmarks of "We don't understand this sh*t, so we think no one else does, so we think god did it". And the rest of the illiterate rabble thinks the same and says "Well that SOUNDS right, let's be skeptical about the very science that lets us use computers in the first place!"
Human sense augmentation has come quite a long way when we can identify a millisecond event in a gigayear process within a gigaparsec radius. But we can't find Osama, or my car keys.
--
make install -not war
Or did anyone else actually hear a middle-eastern accent when reading the parent post?
it's a boy!...wait...we need to check again. we'll get back to you in 50,000 years.
Hopefully, a sensor was able to catch some gravity waves from this. This is the sort of event that should produce large, measurable gravity waves, so we may finally have evidence of their existence. I certainly hope so.
Offtopic? How is Rosie O'Donnell reaching critical mass offtopic?
That's the way it's supposed to work. "They" didn't ALL believe that obviously, and when there was enough evidence to the contrary the theory was updated.
Scientists can be just as guilty as anyone of holding onto their beliefs, the difference is they can't say "God told me so" and justify killing the nonbelievers.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
"so much for the afterglow"
It was so bright that if it had happened just over 2 billion light years away we'd still be able to see it with a powerful telescope.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I must have Looney Tunes on the brain this morning, because my gray matter parsed this...
;-)
"...thanks to an automated email system that notifies astronomers worldwide..."
As this:
"...thanks to an automated anvil system that notifies astronomers worldwide."
I had this bizarre image of all different types and sizes of anvils, all with messages about the GRB attached, dropping onto (and through) desks and computers of astronomers all over the place while, in the background, Marvin the Martian is cackling about it in that lovably maniacal way that only Mel Blanc could give him.
Essence, I wish Chuck Jones was still around to exploit this one...
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
And the rest of the illiterate rabble thinks the same and says "Well that SOUNDS right, let's be skeptical about the very science that lets us use computers in the first place!"
You sound like Jeff Goldblume in a bad movie about aliens or dinosaurs or whatever...
The truth is that if we really examined the number of theories vs. the number of provable truths you'd realize that the skeptics are the odds on winners. Being a skeptic doesn't mean you're rejecting anything other than the idea that half assed theories are best ignored until more data is gathered.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Once upon a time, the student paper at my alma mater ran a classified ad:5 243424/002-4715325-2440858?v=glance r l/index=books&field-author=%20Harry%20Shipman/002- 4715325-2440858
Red giant seeks white dwarf for binary relationship. Contact harry shipman [phone number for astronomy department.]
Even since then, the paper has required ID to place a personal ad.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/039
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-u
Black Holes, Quasars, and the Universe
by Harry L Shipman
Is that the current scientific consensus? Because I've just yesterday read about a whole different theory behind GRBs, namely that they signal a collapse of a super-massive star inside star nurseries at the edges of the observable Universe.
The dad was handing out cigars and someone one lit one up soon afterwards.
This would make for the easiest hole on the course. As long you hit the ball anywhere near the black hole it will make it in the hole in one shot ... eventually
And so a star was born.
Er...wait...nevermind.
Warning: Could be fatal if taken seriously
So far these have been the least intelligent responses to scientific matter I believe I have ever see on slashdot.
:-) But then, it's Slashdot, and it does have its moments.
Yeah, kind of dire.
Here's a slightly scientific thought for you though (but only slightly). What's the extinction radius of a 10,000 trillion trillion trillion watt event like this one?
Because if the extinction radius is at all large, and if this happens at all frequently on a cosmological timescale, then it ought to be factored into Drake's equation.
It could be the reason why the galaxy doesn't appear to be crammed full of high-tech intelligent life --- maybe random sectors of the galaxy everywhere get sterilized back to lifelessness by magnetar events often enough to keep the average density of life in the galaxy near zero, because life simply can't persist very long?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
People comments here are just getting more stupid everyday ...
...at the moment of discovery part of the world had just rotated out of its own shadow relative to the Sun? For one thing, this is always true, no matter what the event is.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Mod parent up, one should take all those new hypotheses with a grain of salt indeed.
If God manifested Himself to us here He would do so in the form of a spraycan advertised on TV. -- Philip K. Dick
This is something that happened 2.2 billion years ago, and they are just now getting around to reporting it?!?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
THIS IS FUNNY!
MOD PARENT UP!
Does anyone remember this song about Swift? It came up a long time ago on Slashdot in a story on the RIAA bothering people over mp3s that contained the word "usher" in them.
"But I trust in the people's capacity for reflection, rage and rebellion." -Oscar Olivera
Prove it.
Its true, i saw it too from my terrace, enjoying a cup of capuccino.
Salut,
AC
./starsearch.pl | mail -s "You have a new black hole!" space-folk
Typingsux, you forgot to post the link.
Holly: As it transpired, there weren't any Black Holes.
Rimmer: But you saw them - you saw them on the monitor.
Holly: They weren't Black Holes.
Rimmer: What were they?
Holly: Grit. Five specks of grit on the scanner-scope. See, the thing about grit is, it's black, and the thing about scanner-scopes...
Rimmer: Oh, shut up.
For those unfamiliar with the quote, here is the previous reference:
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, its main distinguishing feature, is it's black. And the thing about space, your basic space colour is black. So how are you supposed to see them?
Rimmer: But five of them! How can you be ambushed by five Black Holes?
Holly: Always the way, isn't it? You hang around in deep space for three million years and you don't see one. Then, all of a sudden, five all turn up at once.
I think it probably bears little relation to the real physics!
Naturally, you have proof! Right?... Right?
Yeah, that's what I thought. Without proof, the THEORY that YOU CHOOSE to believe is no better or more valid than any fantasy that I may conjure up on the subject. "Studied black holes for a bit", indeed!
http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/
7 .html
This is exactly the type of thing they're looking for a gravitational 'signature' from - it should give a 'chirp' or a signal with increasing frequency as the neurton stars orbit around each other closer and closer.
Here's a relevant quote:
http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR1236
"In Einstein's theory, alterations in the shape of concentrations of mass (or energy) have the effect of warping space-time, thereby causing distortions that propagate through the universe at the speed of light. A new generation of detectors, led by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), is coming into operation and promises sensitivities that will be capable of detecting a variety of catastrophic events, such as the gravitational collapse of stars or the coalescence of compact binary systems."
Tag lost or not installed.
Fearful boy: Turn off it!!!
Idiot engineer: How to?
Fearful boy: Turn off it!!! We've not time!!!
Idiot engineer: Excuse me ...
Fearful boy: Quick!!!
Idiot engineer: Where is the interruptor?
Ooooarrrgghhhhbllooooormmmmm!!!
The black hole did eat them.
It's because we don't know where we dropped the car kes, so we might as well search under the street lights. We look for evidence to test the leading theories. (Also, of course, in some fields there are so many theories yet unresolved that it would be nearly impossible to describe evidence that wouldn't fit one of them.)
However, gamma ray bursters are a great example of evidence that no one had predicted. Then came hypotheses to describe what they might be, which resolved into a theory with further evidence, which was further confirmed today.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
See Manifold: Space and Diaspora for two of the better-written novels exploring the concept of gamma-ray bursts punching a galaxy-wide Big Red Button.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
What they detected was a gamma ray burst and an afterglow. Everything else is speculation; they are basically saying "if all our theories are correct, then the explanation that this is two neutron stars merging into a black hole is the most plausible explanation". The observation does not provide any additional evidence that black holes exist.
That is all.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
What did this celestial event look like? Luckily, we get to see an artist's rendition of what we think the x-rays must have shown.
I must admit, I am not really sure I agree with all the assumptions and timing from things like this. Do astronomers get lucky at lottery also?
...it's a bouncing baby black hole.
Length: Theoretically Infinite
Weight: Theoretically Infinite
Mass: Bigger by the second.
That's quite the apgar score!
This is the best Democracy money can buy?!?!?
For the people asking about "haven't these things been detected before?:
This was an optical afterglow from a "very short duration" GRB.
Optical afterglows from OTHER, longer duration GRBs (e.g. GRB000630) HAVE been detected.
There are different types of GRBs, and this is the first time people detected an optical afterglow of this type. Here's some on this (cf. SWIFT):
* There are two classes of GRB: those that last less than about 2 seconds, and those that last longer than about 2 seconds
* The long bursts occur at cosmological distances; while distances of the short bursts have not been measured
* Given the distance of the long bursts, they must put out about 1053 ergs of energy (if they emit energy equally in all directions)
To get an idea of how much energy 1053 ergs really is, our Sun puts out about 1033 ergs each second. It would take our Sun, then, 880 billion years to put out the same energy as a GRB! For perspective, our Sun will only live to be about 10 billion years, and our Universe is only about 12 billion years old.
Putting the facts together, astrophysicists have narrowed the field to two promising theories for the origin of GRBs: neutron star/neutron star mergers and hypernovae. The truth may lie between these two theories somewhere -- for example, the long bursts may be from hypernovae while the short bursts are from neutron star/neutron star mergers. However, it may also be that GRBs originate from something that astronomers haven't considered yet.
Neutron Star/Neutron Star Merger:
As two neutron stars orbit each other, they lose rotational energy to gravitational energy, thus decaying their orbit. (Actually, the orbit of any two bodies decays, but in the case of two neutron stars, it occurs much faster than it would in, say, the Earth-Moon or Sun-Earth system.) Eventually the two neutron stars will collide, forming a black hole and possibly radiating a large amount of energy.
Hypernovae:
At the end of a massive star's life (mass greater than about 10 Suns), it dies spectacularly in a supernova explosion, leaving behind a neutron star or black hole. Astronomers have known about supernovae for quite some time. However, if the star is very massive (mass greater than about 40 Suns) the collapse may appear different from a supernova, with an energy output greater than a regular supernova by about 100 times. Such large explosions are called hypernovae, and could be the source of at least some GRBs.
Not just identify and detect, but predict. This is just another nail in the coffin of Intelligent Design "theory" and similar nonscientific drivel. This whole science business we modern humans have been working on, and all the theories that are widely accepted today, are all interconnected, with layers upon layers of interdependency, which provides a sort of check-and-balance on the whole mess. One cannot accept that modern scientific theory predicted this black-hole event, which observers around the world could see and record with (technologically augmented) senses, while completely denying the validity of interdependent theories like electromagentism, gravity, relativity, quantum physics, etc. It's important to make this clear to those who would pick and choose which theories they happen to like or which support their own offbeat schemes for how the world works. It's all connected, and you can either take it all (with a grain of salt and a good measure of critical rationalism, of course, because nothing is beyond all doubt and one should always be open to new evidence that contradicts an accepted theory) or chuck it all and go read your horoscope.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
It has all the earmarks of "We make this sh*t up, then go looking for it." And God says, "Well, if that's what you want - then here it is!"
I hereby solemnly predict hot chicks will find slashdot nerds irresistably attractive.
God? are you listening???
of two neutron stars?
somehow it reminds me of Chrysler and Daimler-Benz. Not sure why.
Ah, someone's been reading his Laumer...
I, for one, welcome our new incredibly dense overlords.
A thousand ergs here or there didn't seem like much, so I googled for a definition, and one erg is almost literally one fleapower:
g ci789813,00.html)
It has been suggested that 1 erg is approximately the amount of energy required for a mosquito to take off. (http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_
Quoting parent's quote of the linked page:
To get an idea of how much energy 1053 ergs really is, our Sun puts out about 1033 ergs each second.
Well that's what, about a two percent increase over the Sun's output? Wait a second, The Sun only puts out a thousand fleapower???
Quoting the actual linked-to webpage http://swift.sonoma.edu/about_swift/grbs.html:
To get an idea of how much energy 10^53 ergs really is, our Sun puts out about 10^33 ergs each second.
OH! That's Ten to the power of 33, not a thousand and thirty three for the Sun's output. And the GRB puts out Ten to the 53rd power ergs, or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 times as much as the Sun, for its few seconds of glory.
Oh well, no big deal, what's twenty orders of magnitude between friends?
Tag lost or not installed.
Huge amounts of money are poured into computers. Huge amounts of time, Huge amounts of life. Very few computers are used to do anything constructive or productive (making food or shelter). Very few of the people that use them understand how they work, and in almost all cases a pencil and paper would achieve the same work more efficiently.
They certainly emit Xrays, I bet they emit bursts of gamma radiation as well.
As I was reading the article I was amazed to read that this happened 2.2 billion light-years away == 2.2 billion years ago.
So I was thinking, that suppouse that we could find a way to travel faster than light and maybe teletransport us anywhere in a reasonable ammount of time.....
How are we going to know where we should go if what we are able to see are things that are not there anymore ?
(I mean not in the place we see them, and maybe they doesn't exist anymore)
We could try to calculate the new coordinates of things, or simulate how things would be arround there now, but that is and will be far away from being usefull.
(try simulating the whole galaxy 2 billions of years in the future)
Errors in calculations due to inexactitude would mean inmense distances beacuse of the magnitude of the travel distances we are talking about.
So the places that we decide to go would always be wrong, and it would be very dangerous because it would be easy to appear in the wrong place (inside a planet, too close to a black hole, etc.) or it would be really easy to hit something at that speeds since there would be no alert, no radars, beacuse of travelling faster than light.
Are we doomed to travel at sub-light-speeds and never be able to reach that very very far places in considerable time?
(I know Einstein says so)
See:
You can view the article at:http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9901322
The two stars "merged," there was a "black hole," and then an "afterglow."
;)
Am I alone here in thinking that the Astronomers who made this discovery might be a little frustrated?
A faint x-ray afterglow was detected, but there is currently no convincing detection of the optical afterglow.
See http://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/gcn3_archive.html for the latest.
This was not a physicist which ordered the bomb beeing thrown on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Actually the physicist were horrified at what they "built" and some bitterly regretted it. They came up with the idea how to create energy, but they can't be held responsible on how moron then abuse the idea.
On the contrary the church itself came up with the idea of inquisition, heresy, burning people at stakes and so on.
I hope you see the difference between the two, isn't it ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
A very belated Happy Birthday ?. This black hole was probably born before there were mammals on earth , I suppose.
Looking into deep space is sort of looking back into time - time is space and space is timeQuidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Wow, these astronomer people really have their act down. A explosion lasts a couple milliseconds, and an automatic email is sent around the world. I wish I could do this myself. If I oversleep a couple milliseconds, the optical afterglow from my brain patterns is spotted from a satellite, and an email is sent to my boss saying I'm sick. The perfect solution to oversleeping: the NASA "SLEEP": Sound Ladar Electronic Emplusation Pre-sequencer.
I watched it a few weeks ago on DVD.
Can't be that bad if 26 years later I'm still watching it.
Might be blasphemy around here, but I think its as good or better than another sci-fi movie that came out around that time...
Since my post is the most important one here don't read any of the (puke) others. But hey, while you're not going to STOP ANYWAY you might as well crowd on over to MY website http://www.newpath4.com/ where no one posts. EVER. Just ME. I write and everyone else reads.
you've gotta be careful with them nasa guys advertisements... Remember not so long ago they loudly claimed the discovery of pure quark stars which got prime time on NASA TV and then the story slowly died... Is there a funding deadline coming up sometime soon? Let's wait a month or two and see whatever comes out of it in peer reviewed places.
You're confusing the issue. The way you put it, skeptic (with a K) is simply an empirical philosophy. The author was referring to people abandoning that philosophy in the course of shunning (becoming sceptical of [with a C]) science and the scientific method of understanding the world.
There is a large amount of pseudoscience floating around in popular religoius culture, and it's difficult to point out the "pseudo-" nature of these beliefs. I don't understand how a bunch of people who claim to adhere to a strict interpretation of the Bible can adopt such bizarre pseudoscientific beliefs willy-nilly.
Now when it comes to the legitimate scientific progress, which is ongoing and can call into question theories from any discipline in its course, that's another matter entirely. Calling theories like the Big Bang or Evolution "half-assed" can be regarded as pseudoscientific, since more than 95 out of 100 scientists agree that these are not only sound theories, but that they are integral in the formulation of other predictive theories in their respective disciplines. Pseudoscience, of course, can explain anything by working backwards from desired explanation to any possible supporting information, and then conveniently finds said information. Anyway, everyone here is familiar with this debate.
as i understand it, gamma rays do not travel at lightspeed .. so please tell me why, as described in the article, the GRB occurred, seen on earth, and THEN moments later, the light arrived.
...etc etc...
inquiring minds
"There are 11 kinds of people: those who know binary, those who don't, and those who could not care less!"