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Black Hole Cluster Spawns Massive Cloud
Shifty Jim writes in with an article at space.com reporting that a cluster of galaxies harboring black holes may be the source of a massive cloud millions of light years across. Quoting: "A giant cloud of superheated gas 6 million light years wide might be formed by the collective sigh of several supermassive black holes, scientists say. The plasma cloud... might be the source of mysterious cosmic rays that permeate our universe... The plasma cloud is located about 300 million light years away near the Coma Cluster and is spread across a vast region of space thought to contain several galaxies with supermassive black holes... embedded at their centers."
I know, it's a black hole!
Cowboy Neal's black hole spawns a massive cloud of stink on a daily basis.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It's Galactus!
But I'm totally clueless how a Black hole can spawn anything. I thought they were 'Black holes', or have that changed recently?
Dear visitor, please respect our pristine plasma cloud by dumping your trash in one of our many blackholes. Thank you.
> But I'm totally clueless how a Black hole can spawn anything.
Black holes spawn a lot of interest, debate, Stephen Hawking's Theses, one Disney movie and an endless source of Deus ex machina. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina .
So why is this a surprise? My black hole makes clouds of gas when I eat beans.
might be the source?
might be?
there are probably a zillion black wholes and a gazillion such "cosmic clouds of superheated gas" in the universe. so what makes this guy think this particular "cloud" has agreater probability of being the source of the "cosmic rays" that "permeate" our universe?
Now here's one iPoddy site! iPod Range
It is a ORI ship coming out of a supergate
Correction: was located
That's that damnest thing about observing something 300 million light years away.
And does it run Linux?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1 bottles of beer on the wall. Take one down, pass it round... Oh, umm...
http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/fuseaction/home .story/story_id/10251
I thought this was a thread about donuts with purple filled centers! Where's my donuts with purple filled centers? By the way... purple is a fruit.
The Delphic Expanse is real after all. We must act quickly before the Sphere-Builders overwhelm us all. Well ok not that quickly, but maybe now that there's an immanent terrorist threat from space W will be a little more enthusiastic about funding NASA...
Come read my stupid blagablog. Rants and Giggles
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ApJ/journal/issue s/ApJ/v659n1/64492/brief/64492.abstract.html
A cluster of black holes is a literal clusterfuck.
I don't think that in this case its speed relative to us times 300 million years is bigger than the uncertainty in those 300 million light years. Your comment is as stupid as saying that textbooks should write that the distance to the moon "was" approximately 384,400 km. So please shut up unless you can argue that the difference is important.
by sending out Beowulf Schaeffer in a singleship. We might be facing a Pak protector invasion soon, in front of the cosmic ray blast that will sterilize our planet. /grin
My physics is from the mid 80's so it is 20+ years out of date. But what I remember is that if you put a black hole inside a hydrogen cloud, all the hydrogen and anything else that gets sucked inside the Schwartzchild radius will be ripped apart and converted to energy and approximately half of that energy will be radiated outwards, the other half getting sucked into the black hole.
Black holes can radiate huge amounts of radiation if you keep dumping matter into them.
I have one question. If the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture is not in charge of Gundam, then who is?
That's right- so be nice to dolphins or they will flee to their expanse thingy and say, "So long, and thanks for all the fish!"
Yes. That's how the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies form.
Bad article to read after reading the goatse.cx for sale article...
Matter on the way into a black hole gets compressed by the immense gravity to tremendous pressures, forming an accretion disk, which radiates mostly x-rays and similar forms of high-energy radiation. It isn't really the black holes that are radiating, but the matter falling in that does. Tossing matter into a black hole is probably a far more efficient way of converting matter into energy than even nuclear fusion.
Hawking radiation probably isn't what's going on here. The temperature of a typical stellar mass black hole is about 10^-8 kelvin, way colder than the cosmic background radiation at 2.7 K, so it actually gains more energy from the background than it loses from Hawking radiation. Larger black holes are colder still. It's the really really small black holes (such as the hypothesized primordial black holes might have formed by small irregularities in the early universe that collapsed in on themselves; typical one squeezes the mass of a large mountain into a space a quarter the size of a proton) which are supposed to radiate significant quantities of Hawking radiation.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Seriously, the parent completely misstated the intensity of hawking radiation. I can't believe it got modded up to 4 in the first place.
Now, black holes are often surrounded by bright clouds, but the clouds are bright for reasons completely unrelated to hawking radiation. As stuff falls into a black hole, it gets accelerated until it's going really fast. Once it gets fast enough, the light generated by the friction of the things falling in gets blue-shifted until it moves into the x-ray range. Now, this does occur a lot, so many black holes are detectable as the presumed center of giant x-ray vortexes, but that is completely different from hawking radiation since this is caused by material external to the black hole falling in.
TFA pretty clearly states that the scientist in question does think that the cloud might be related to the cosmic ray production as well as CMB noise:
I quit!
Pretty much anytime someone talks about a black hole observation they are actually talking about an accretion disk around a black hole. Just about the only exception I can think of gravitational lensing. Although the article does not go into much detail, it is likely that the theory implicates some coincidental activity of matter falling into the black holes from their accretion disks, the resulting release of energy being the cause of heating of this cloud of gas.
By the way, since scale can be hard to appreciate in space, the article says the cloud is 6 million light years accross. In comparison, the Milky Way is only about 80,000 light years in diameter.