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.
Dad's a little dazed...
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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...
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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?
That's what I thought when I heard about Paula Abdul on Idol... this is how burned out old stars on earth behave, they attemt to merge with younger, brighter stars. A little titillation and BAM(!) their radiating again and the envy of all their neighboring dying stars.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
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
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 ]
Poor wording. It didn't come from inside the event horizon, but probably right outside it, or before an event horizon was created it was emitted.
IANAP; though, I do have a strong intrest in it.
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.
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
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
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.
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
I wouldn't give the so-called rational scientists too much credit either. They "knew" that the cosmos was perfect and unchanging, in spite of evidence to the contrary. All human beings have prejudices and irrational ideas.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
God put them on earth to test you.
Via evolution, of course.
sulli
RTFJ.
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!"
From what I've read, you have a better chance of detecting a black hole by looking for the effects of its gravitational field on light that passes nearby. It should warp the apparent positions of stars.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
You're probably joking, but you got modded informative so:
From your link "according to a physicist"... There is a general consensus that black holes with singularities exist, but the universe doesn't give a damn about our consensual opinion - the Earth would be flat otherwise.
This is how science works, people come up with testable ideas which are proven right or wrong. No-one is arguing that super-dense, intrinsically dark objects don't exist, we have plenty of evidence that they do. Infinitely dense singularities, well, maybe not - if they exist as we predict they're inside an event horizon and therefore unobservable so actually directly verifying their existance is always going to be impossible... all we can do is come up with odd ideas like dark energy stars which might bounce matter out and see if we can observe that happening.
Slashdot - Mutual Assured Discussion
They "knew" that the cosmos was perfect and unchanging, in spite of evidence to the contrary.
The main difference being, of course, was once the evidence became irrefutable that such notions were incorrect, scientists changed the theories to fit the data. Religions have a tendency to kill people when challenged.
Black holes are detectable. The accretion disk about the even horizon emits a lot of gamma rays, because matter falling into the hole are accelerated like crazy. Once matter has reach the even horizon of course, nothing escapes.
Think of it as a last cry of atoms being swallowed.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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
I don't know if you can estimate the actual brightness of the object. If it is like the longer duration bursters, it produces two jets of radiation along an axis through the center of the object. How close are we to the center of that axis?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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.
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.
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
Every other post seems to be a joke, so I'll just put this here. What's with the artist's rendition? The article said the event was photographed, why not use that image instead of some swirly colors that may or may not have any relation to reality?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
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
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.
Real image: (Note it is a negative - black means lots of light. The big thing in the middle is a galaxy, and the error box is pointing to somewhere on its outer edge.)0 9.jpg
http://www.srl.caltech.edu/~cenko/grb050509b/0505
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.
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
Where do you think the word "Protestant" came from?
And how many people died as a direct result of the Protestant reformation? Compare, please, to the number of people who died as a part of the revolution in physics at the advent of quantum mechanics and general relativity.