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Hundreds of Black Holes Found
eldavojohn writes "Hundreds of black holes that were thought to exist at the beginning of the universe have been found by NASA's Spitzer and Chandra space telescopes. From the article, 'The findings are also the first direct evidence that most, if not all, massive galaxies in the distant universe spent their youths building monstrous black holes at their cores. For decades, a large population of active black holes has been considered missing. These highly energetic structures belong to a class of black holes called quasars. A quasar consists of a doughnut-shaped cloud of gas and dust that surrounds and feeds a budding supermassive black hole. As the gas and dust are devoured by the black hole, they heat up and shoot out X-rays. Those X-rays can be detected as a general glow in space, but often the quasars themselves can't be seen directly because dust and gas blocks them from our view.' This is pretty big, as it's empirical evidence proving the existence of objects that theoretically had to exist but could not be detected previously."
Not to be pedantic, but couldn't there be another source for the x-rays? What would've happened if this was someones pet theory?
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Yeah, you didn't know that?
I saw these with my backyard telescope the other day, forgot to mention it to NASA though... oops, maybe next time.
Despite sharing gas clouds and the emission of toxic energy, quasars are found in space while red holes are found near Taco Bells.
'The findings are also the first direct evidence that most, if not all, massive galaxies in the distant universe spent their youths building monstrous black holes at their cores.
That's funny, because I've heard the same thing about Dick Cheney.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I was scared I might have run into one in a dark alley one night, thank goodness they have been found. On a more serious note, the article mentions that "the galaxies are 9-11 billion years old, and that they *did* exist when the universe was in it's adolescence." Does this mean they are no longer there? And if not, what would have become of the black holes?
I am confused about the intended meaning of the dept. appellation for this story: "no-not-the-view-studio-audience". Can someone please edify me as to the proper parsing of this humor?
Hot damn, we're fucked.
"Those X-rays can be detected as a general glow in space, but often the quasars themselves can't be seen directly because dust and gas blocks them from our view."
pfft yea sure, i'll believe it's a black hole when i see it.
sigs... don't talk to me about sigs....
RIMMER: My answer: In answering the question, "What does the red spectrum tell us about quasars?" there are various words that need to be defined. What is a spectrum, what is a red one, why is it red, and why is it so frequently linked with quasars?
He pauses and looks puzzled.
RIMMER: What the hell is a quasar? Just put a neat cross through it and we'll do the next one, OK?
Suddenly black holes, lots of them!
What happens when two or more black holes collide?
No, this just proves that, for certain empirical cases, the difference between theory and practice is smaller in practice than certain other theoretically challenged cases: in other words, this one is rather similar, while still remaining slightly different.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I may be totally inept at this whole astronomy thing, but I am curious. If all or most galaxies have black holes at the center, where does the debris and dust and all the other stuff that makes a galaxy work come from? Obviously the black hole is pulling stuff toward it, but where does that stuff come from? And how did it get there?
The game.
I for one welcome our Black Hole overlords.
IANAP however it sounds as if this could have some affect on the Dark Matter/Energy theories. Since Dark Matter/Energy I believe was invented to balance out seemingly correct equations on a cosmic scale? Perhaps this accounts for the extra gravity holding a system together?
Can any physicists elaborate on this for us.
Thanks.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Halton Arp discovered that quasars are in fact observed to be connected to or being ejected from spiral galaxies. Even though the mainstream theories badly need these objects to exist at the edge of space due to their high redshifts, more recent statistics demonstrate that Arp is probably right, and that redshift is not strictly an indication of distance.
But the fact that there is any debate at all on it is rather silly. People can observe the images that Arp discusses and decide for themselves whether or not he is right. The real question is whether or not you believe somebody's math over your own eyes.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
"The goatse guy could not be reached for comment."
Now I'd like to have them back, now, please.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
DISCLAIMER: All my current knowledge on the subject comes from a couple weeks of mild interest with NO physics or astronomy background almost a decade ago. And I have a horrible memory.
I think it has something to do with Hawking Radiation, which eventually uses up all the matter-energy in the black hole, causing them to shrink and evaporate. This is why the bajillions of micro black holes (as in, on the quantum scale) that theoretically exist EVERYWHERE (there's probably an astronomical number in your brain right now, even) don't last for very long (fractions of fractions of fractions of a second), evaporating before they can suck up enough matter to grow big enough to be a problem. I don't know how long it would take for these large black holes to evaporate, though.
black holes, hundreds of them
As covered by Red Dwarf... ... We've been in space for three million years and there hasn't been one! Then, all of a sudden five of them turn up at once!"
"Well, the thing about a Black Hole, its main distinguishing feature, is it's black! And the thing about space, the colour of space, yer basic space colour, is its Black! So how are you supposed to see them.
And the cause of all these black holes?
"Five specs of grit on the scanner scope....the thing is about Grit... is it's black.."
groklaw, wired and slashdot. The holy trinity of work based time wasting.
Proposed names for black holes:
1. American culture
2. Human environmental conscience
3. Good TV
4. Disco Comeback
5. Emo
6. Proof of Jesus
7. D.A.R.E.
Giant failures, humanity!
Anti-Globalism
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Why the fuck is this +5 funny. Fucking mods.
These are the qustions that no one can answer, so they just make things up. Some of these people are scientists, others are crackpots. Some are a bit of both. Either way, there is no single, satisfying solution.
What created the precursor to the precursor of the precursor? And the precursor to that? It's almost a silly question because you can quickly see that the line of questioning will never be resolved.
Perhaps they spontaneously appeared. Or, as a facet of their infinite nature, they aways existed. Or, they were tears cried by God at the time of Creation. Pick the explanation you like, and it can be true for you.
Well, half a black hole.
Oh good! I was worried I'd never see them again. The cleaning lady left my garage door open and they sneaked out.
My quazars will be so happy to have them back home.
-David
They say these are some of the first but I have another theory. They aren't and there are older ones, but we can't see them. Does anyone else think that maybe there are galaxies so old and fairly small (as in dense) that their supermassive black hole had enough time to literally sucked the entire thing in and now there's no more matter outside it so it's completely invisible to us? Cuz we can only really see black holes by seeing the stuff that's emitted from matter around it that's being sucked in.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
ha ha
racists are stupid
At least one person moderated this racist post "Funny," along with a few others, then those moderations disappeared into the Memory Hole.
This sort of moderation-redaction isn't explained on the Slashdot FAQ; someone fill me in? I'd hate to participate in a system that deletes unpopular speech.
- Poster With A Two-Digit ID.
For decades, a large population of active black holes has been considered missing.
Hundreds of active black hoes? Their mine hoes, been lookin for them everywear, man? You bring them hoes back to me, dont you TOUCH those hoes aight? You bring em back I let you sample em if you want, cause Im a great fella.
I was scared I might have run into one in a dark alley one night, thank goodness they have been found.
What you scared about man, their CLEAN black hoes, check em hoes every month, unposible. Those black hoes been with the whole neighborhood and they done nothing to no one.
And what's with that news there:
spent their youths building monstrous black holes at their cores
Yea I spent my youth growing them hoes, but monstrous? You know nothing man, it's exactly big hoes what you want, I garantee it.
What does the red spectrum tell us about quasars?
This is the best restaurant I ever eat in
It's only that someone just came back from a nudist colony.
The best planning can be done after the project completes.
Racists, like conspiracy theorists, realize the truth of the world even though it runs contrary to dominant, irrational memes propagated by the opinion-makers of media.
There are plenty of racists with PhDs, including Harvard professors... the fact that moderators at a pop-culture geek site give a kneejerk negative response to any racialist post doesn't make it "stupid".
As with anything, really, the more popular the idea, the stupider it is -- so it is with the P.C. notion of ultimate equality and myopia with regard to hereditary intelligence and behavior.
the space and everything
the timing is so perfect
m10
...they're honeypots powerful enough to bog down the Storm botnet!
I'm waiting for a "-1 somepeoplejustshouldn'tgetmodprivileges" meta-moderation.
Theory implies a set of truths, following from some axioms. Some truths are confirmed by empirical result that seems to match the phenomenon predicted by the theory, thus attaching evidence of correctness to a mathematical model. What is hard to understand? In modern physics, mathematical necessity sometimes precedes modelling. Physics is no longer a process of observation-first-explanation-later. Discovery now begins in the equations, in many cases.
"This is pretty big, as it's empirical evidence proving the existence of objects that theoretically had to exist but could not be detected previously."
look closely
"empirical evidence proving"
should never occur in any sentence ever. By definition empirical evidence cannot prove anything. Empirical evidence lends support to inductive arguments, which don't concern themselves with proof. Only analytic statements may be proven.
Please, for the love of god remember, there are two forms of logic, inductive which has arguments from experience (physics), and deductive which has arguments from pure reason (mathematics). Only deductive arguments can be proven because you can always argue with the strength of the evidence in inductive claims. It is a fact (supported by inductive evidence and deductive proofs) that inductive claims may be false no matter how strong the evidence for them is. Thus they can never be proven, but you can say "there are strong practical reasons to believe."
People getting basic logic wrong has led to a lot of poor decisions in our society lately, so please do not contribute to the problem by adding to confusion over terms.
ha ha
racists are hate-mongering assholes
Is that really wrong, though?
Every civilization was founded by hate-mongering assholes. It's really the root of humanity. Denying that is denying reality.
Obligatory Cheech and Chong: Up in Smoke paraphrase (regarding the proposed new band uniforms)
"So, it's DIFFERENT, but the SAME?!?!?" That's cool!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Its sad to see someone who tells the truth modded as a troll.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
The universe is now proven to be holier than thou.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
No, you are referring to brown holes. They are not the same things.
I am sure some people will think I am nitpicking, but I am not. I just like to see a bit of precision about the topic of discussion.
Quote: "This is pretty big, as it's empirical evidence proving the existence of objects..."
It is nothing of the sort. It is empirical evidence OF the existence of certain objects. It proves absolutely nothing.
OH!, MY GOD! its full off assholes.
So don't deny it; just move on. All hospitable land on this planet has been colonized and near-instant communication is possible with a great portion of it. What's the point of trying to divide the world when everyone's next door?
Finding Black Holes is an intense job, it's not hard to get Sucked in, and there are always new Events on the Horizon. // Sucky job but somebody's got to do it?? /// Having seen "Event Horizon" I don't think I'd really want to go looking for black holes....ugh.
The fact is that empirical (i.e discovered by investigation) evidence can easily prove things. This is because it can falsify, but every falsification of a negative statement can be reversed into a non-universal affirmation. If I deny the existence of a postulated entity called a black hole, and empirical study turns up a black hole, my denial is falsified and the positive (the existence of black holes) is confirmed.
You are confusing experimental evidence about the specific with inductive logic about the general. If I find a black hole at the centre of galaxies A,B,C....N where A..N is my current list of observable galaxies, I have proven that some galaxies have black holes at the core, but not that all do. A single new galaxy without a black hole would disprove any universal statement, but would have no effect on the statement that _some_ galaxies have black holes.
It's true that a very common logic error by the ignorant is to promote the observational to the universal, but that's unfortunately an aspect of how our brains seem to work.
The reasoning goes like this.
1) The universe cools down and a vast amount of protons and electrons are generated.
2) These combine to form hydrogen.
3) The universe is still very small but expanding very rapidly.
4) The uncertainty principle makes sure that there are some pockets with very high density (comparatively speaking).
5) Some high density regions develop enough gravity to pull in lots of other hydrogen.
6) Everything does not fall straight it goes in circles like planets don't fall directly towards the sun.
7) The hydrogen clouds are so huge that they contain enough matter to create galaxies.
8) The cloud revolves around its center falling inward.
9) The center does not glow like the sun because of the immense amount of matter. It actually reaches the black hole stage with a very negligible star phase.
10) This is the super-massive black hole at the galactic center. Lighter matter then spreads out because of interactions with heavier matter falling in. The heavier matter eventually becomes a part of the black hole at the center.
11) Normally it becomes a nearly circular disk.
The only weird thing (for me) is that it does not start out as a sphere but as a strip (I believe not a thin strip).
Disclaimer: IANAAP.
Now they know how many black holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.
Worst. Signature. Ever.
Cuz we can only really see black holes by seeing the stuff that's emitted from matter around it that's being sucked in.
An interesting thought, but black holes dialate space time around them. This causes what is called gravational lensing. The super massive gravity of the black hole actuall bends light of stars behind it in space. There have been black holes that have been discovered because astronomers have noticed the effects of gravational lensing.
Also, if matter is being sucked in from an accretion disk, it is highly unlikely that it will all fall into the hole. Pretty much any black hole is going to rotate, and most will rotate VERY fast, since when a star collapses conservation of momentum will cause it to accelerate its rotation as it shrinks. Any particles near the black hole will be pulled around it as it rotates, and some mass will end up in orbit around the hole. Quasars give off tremendous ammounts of energy as this mass is superheated from friction. Any black hole that has an accretion disk (a.k.a. a quasar)is going to be pretty 'bright', and I would guess that it will stay 'bright' for a very long time after it runs out of mass to actually draw in.
Not to say that your idea doesn't hold water, but there are ways of detecting black holes that aren't absorbing large ammounts of additional mass. Nothing rules out what you suggest though. Just remember, black holes don't really 'suck things in', as science fiction suggests. If our sun became a black hole this very second, everything would keep orbiting exactly as it does now. The only things that would be sucked in would be a few comets that were on a collision course with the sun's gravational pull anyway.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Mmmmh... Donuts!
Goatse guy, is that you...?
$> cd
$> more beer
goes like this. No one knows what happens to matter when it enters a black hole, only that it can't get out again. Secondly, no one knows where the matter for the big bang came from, i mean a whole universe out of nothing.
Couldn't a black hole be a hole in our universe that matter drains out of? Then that matter passes into another dimension to make up someone elses universe. So black holes and big bangs are just two sides of the same hole. Once enough matter (and black holes) have come through, the expansion stops and thanks to the black holes this new universe starts flowing away. Think lava lamp but without bits drifting off.
Impossible to prove but I like its symmetry.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
Scientists have calculated that there should be about 80% more mass in the universe than they're able to account for and have proposed a number of radical theories to resolve the discrepancy such as the existence of dark matter or the influence of parallel universes. The problem was finally solved when Chuck Norris admitted he kicked a hole in the universe and that's where all the missing matter went.
1.Netcraft confirms:In Soviet Russia all your base welcomes a beowolf cluster of CowboyNeal overlords. 2.? 3.Profit!!1!
I am the very model of a Singularitarian
I know of Hawking Radiation though it's rather scary an'
I've read the fella's books about black holes and time's brief history
The Chandrasekhar Limit is a source of no great mystery
Naked singularities are rather well-prohibited
By principles of cosmic censorship existence-limited
I know of relativity and matters cosmological
And wash my socks in soapy suds both flash and biological
And wash my socks in soapy suds both flash and biological
And wash my socks in soapy suds both flash and biological
And wash my socks in soapy suds both flash and biologicogical
In fact I'm rather well-informed on matters wide and varied an'
I am the very model of a Singularitarian
"Direct" evidence? The article points to the relationship to the quasars (are they considered "directly" related now? I missed that point) and then continues on quasars as if it is the same thing...
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
God: "Oh. Allright."
I miss Red Dwarf :-)
A.A
Your mind is like a parachute. It works best when it's been opened.
Makes that trip to see God a bit trickier.
FTA: "...most, if not all, massive galaxies in the distant universe spent their youths building monstrous black holes at their cores."
That's exactly the problem with galaxies these days. They sit around all day, killing their brain cells on violent video games, unhealthy food, and astronomical porn (and listen, Vega doesn't look as good in a bikini as she used to). And what happens? Black holes at their cores. Big frickin' black holes at their cores. No morals, no ethics, not a clue about how to be nice to your galactic neighbors. When I was a young galaxy (and a rather handsome one too), that didn't happen. We helped old stars carry their groceries across the street, picked up the trash left by those damn comets, and had big parties when new stars were born. About the most reckless thing we did was a joyride through a nebula or two.
Dang kids. Get off my lawn!
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Well, the Earth is pulling the moon towards it too, and yet we still have a moon after all these billions of years. The Sun is pulling the Earth towards it, but, funnily enough, after all these billions of years we're not quite there yet.
In a sense, the Hitchhiker's guide got that right: ""There is an art to flying, or rather a knack. It knack lies in learning to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, that provides the difficulties."" We keep falling in an almost circular orbit around the Sun and ending up (almost) where we started.
What I'm trying to say is that those super-massive black holes obviously do suck everything towards them. But the rest of the galaxy sees it as centripetal force and rotates around them.
The problems with a black holes are at closer ranges.
For a start, if you do get closer to it than its event horizon, then you're properly fucked. There is no way to get out of there, not even theoretically. Not even light can get out of there. Hence, the name black hole.
However, I'll return to the analogy with the solar system. With the Sun's massive gravity well, it's damn near impossible to hit it, even if you wanted to. If you dropped a big rock right at it, even the slighest deviation or initial speed sideways (like would happen if you dropped it from Earth), would cause a clean miss and you'd just get that rock in some kind of orbit around it. The only way to actually hit the sun would be if that orbit was flattened enough that it passes through the sun.
And the same problem applies to black holes too. Remember that it's a more massive gravity well _and_ the "bullseye" is much smaller, at least in relation to the gravity well. As you fall even a little off the centre, your speed would increase enough so at one point the centrifugal force (yes, I know it doesn't even exist, but it makes the explanation easier) just flings you clean around it.
There's even at least one theory that nothing ever finishes falling into a black star. Although there is energy loss due to that X-ray emission and all, basically matter just spirals closer and closer to the event horizon without ever reaching it. Think an asymptotic decay. It gets closer and closer and closer over time, but never quite reaches it.
The second problem is, well, tides. If you get close enough to the centre of a gravity well, say, looking at the centre, then your front is pulled towards it much stronger than your back is.
This is actually true for any gravity well, and, again, you can see it in action in the solar system too. That's why the moon is tidal-locked with the Earth and you always see the same face of it.
But for a massive enough gravity well, the force difference gets larger and can rip a star or a planet apart. That's how stars and black holes end up occasionally peeling another star apart, pretty much syphoning its outer layers.
So basically you could be past the event horizon and still be properly fucked, in slightly different way.
But even that only extends so far. IIRC there are stars orbitting the centre of a galaxy with a period measured in hours. Admittedly, that's not as close as it might suggest, again because of the massive gravity. Even with that angular speed, you still need a heck of a radius to stay in orbit there. But, still, if those survive just fine, then you can probably see how the rest of the galaxy is safe.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Science, and works. Can anyone explain now consequences of this discovery? Or it, by now, is restricted "just" to be "the first direct evidence that most, if not all, massive galaxies in the distant universe spent their youths building monstrous black holes at their cores."
!sig
The question was: when did they form?
If a Black Hole is in a region with lots of material...it grows. Here's (roughly) how: most of material will orbit the black hole so the Black hole won't grow. BUT: if the density is high enough, it will form an orbiting disk of material. The particles in the disk will collide with each other in their mad dash around the black hole, heating the disk up, and knocking some of the material out of orbit, into the black hole. So you end up with the black hole growing, and an extremely hot disk shining X-rays across the Universe. This has been seen in more nearby quasars. Here they have found the X-rays from the more distant hot disks.
This discovery should be classified as excellend confirmation of what most astronomers thought must be true.
In the end of the poor life of a black hole, what happens?
Any ways, time will tell if what they have found are black holes or not. If they are there should be some sort of change to them over a period of time and thus we should see that change. This might take longer then we would like but there should be a change.
Aside from being a cool observation, I think the most important aspect of this story was that the astronomers failed to realize the potentially great acronym here. The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) is good, but would it not be better to be just the Great Observatories Deep Survey?
No sinful star-eating black hole can cloak itself in dusty bands to hide from the all-seeing eye of GODS!
Just go to the east side of town where they sell drugs. You'll not only find black ones, but white ones too.
Oh, HOLES, I thought you said HOs. Sorry, my bad. I was wondering WTF a nerd site was doing talking about... never mind.
* An object theoretically had to exist,
* Therefore, this object may or may not have existed.
* This evidence proves an object may or may not have existed.
* The evidence proves nothings?
* Confirmation bias?
* Profit! (?)
"Hundreds of black holes that were thought to exist at the beginning of the universe..."
How can there be a 'beginning of the universe?' That would also imply that there is/was an end and what would there be after the end or between the end of the last universe and the beginning of ours?
Until one gobbled up my vacuum cleaner into microscopic invisibilty last week. Glad I let go quickly.
Straight space as observed by human eyes and interpreted by human brains is defined by movement along a light ray path. It is obvious because if you are looking directly at an object as it appears that is where the photons come from.
Light bends severely near the event horizion making it an invisibility cloak even better than this one: http://science.howstuffworks.com/invisibility-cloak.htm because instead of mimicking the light it actually bends space to redirect the light itself. Sweet...
There is a point at which any object directly behind the black hole makes a ring due to space being bent like a lens so that the rays converge and fall on a single point. However lensing by a black hole, even up close, will resemble this http://www-ra.phys.utas.edu.au/~jlovell/simlens/lens_large.gif
Recently, though, I realized I was clicking on n reply beneath your current threshold. a little too often to see where certain threads took me. I started reading at a threshold of -1 to ease up on the mouse-clicks, and found that there were some deeply nested comments that should have higher mod-points.
I felt satisfied with my decision and now browse at -1 consistantly.
Until today, /. was an escape for me at work where I could read posts from "enlightened" posters. I was looking forward to technobabble revolving around blackhole theory.
What I got was A LOT of mean-spirited rascist comments. And I mean A LOT. Browse at -1 if you don't believe me and read some of these.
I know /. is filled with people of differing views and opinions such as evolution vs. creationism vs. intelligent design (which are some of my favorite /. debates), Democrats vs. Republicans vs. Independants, Specialists vs. laymen etc. I enjoy the civilized debates and even the heated arguments.
But the level of ignorance I witnessed today was appalling. I know some of it was meant to be humorous and not hurtful, but even humorous racist posts feed the ignorant "Anonymous" posters and give them validation.
Racism is one of the worst socail problems we have on this planet, right up there with religious differneces. It's disgusting, and I'm ashamed to be a part of /. today.
But I'm not leaving. If everyone that was sickened by comments such as these left, there wouldn't be anyone worth reading left. So I'm putting up with it today, and hoping to see less of it in the future.
I gave up religion for Lent.
Black holes emit the same gravity that everything else does. They don't suck stuff down any better than any other clump of matter such as regular stars. So anything orbiting a black hole (like the rest of the galaxy) will just keep orbiting it pretty much forever... Just like the planets in our solar system will keep orbiting the sun pretty much forever.
Take the Earth as an example. The Earth is flying along at about 30 kilometers per second. The sun is tugging on the Earth constantly and causes the Earth to fall toward it. But because the Earth has velocity, it keeps flying off in a tangent and keeps _missing_ the Sun. That's an orbit... a balance between the central mass' gravitational force and the orbiting object's velocity. Stable orbits just continue forever until something alters the kinetic energy of the satellite.
If you want the Earth to actually "fall" into the Sun, you need to de-orbit the Earth. That means you need to put a huge rocket on the Earth that decelerates it by 30 kilometers per second... exactly the amount of speed at which it is flying around the Sun. This would be really hard to do. (If you look at the Saturn V rocket and see how much fuel it took to get that little pointy tip to the moon, you can imaging that doing this for the Earth would be, well, unimaginable.)
It is actually really hard to make things stop orbiting their central mass and subsequently fall into it. Usually you need something that causes drag, a decelerating force, to make that happen. In most cases there isn't much around to provide such a decelerating force.
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Back in the day, we used to watch "Red Dwarf" on a 27 inch Motorola Quasar...
i found too lots of black holes in my backyard... may be the mole that i saw the other day has something to say about it...
a cosmic mole!!!
Looking through some of your other comments, you really like playing the crusader of poor oppressed heretical theories, don't you? But that's not the important part.
The _real_ mark of the crackpot is believing such bullshit as that there's some high priests with some immutable dogma, quashing poor heretic visionaries like Mr Arp.
The truth is that nothing is that stationary or frozen in conjecture. Especially not in astrophysics. The domain has evolved a _lot_ in the last, say, half a century, and stuff that was heresy once is the mainstream consensus now.
E.g., dark matter would have gotten one laughed out the door some decades ago, now it's exactly the mainstream consensus that you rant and rave against. Dark energy actually came even later.
E.g., space expansion itself was far from being set in stone in the 60's, when Arp published his claim. Heck, we didn't even have an estimate for Hubble's constant until 1958, and it would be another couple of decades until there was a consensus on it. Do you even understand what that means? It wasn't even a law or a theory yet, because noone had measured a falsifiable value to put on those equations.
Also, it helps to remember that he's not exactly a nobody that you can handwave away, contrary to whatever mis-understanding you seem to operate on. He's well know, he's got a Ph.D. in the domain (so it's not as easy to hand-wave him away as the normal crackpots), he's got an atlas of galaxies that's still used as a reference, and many galaxies are still referenced by their Arp number. He's not easy to ignore. He stands out like a sore thumb. There have been a _lot_ of people who've studied his claims.
Basically the last point alone should already tell you how bogus your conspiracy theory is. The idea that millions of people worldwide have somehow all decided to support red-shift in spite of all proof to the contrary, all just toed the party line without questioning, and somehow noone ever broke the pact... is what makes any other conspiracy theory laughable in the first place. Governments and secret agencies hardly ever manage to keep a secret when more than 2 people know it, but somehow millions of astrophysicists all decided to ignore Arp's evidence... and none of them squeaked to the press yet. Amazing. Bloody amazing, that's what it would be.
And so on, and so forth.
Arp wasn't some heretic oppressed by the mainstream High Priests, because there was no such mainstream consensus yet. His hypothesis was actually taken as a very serious possibility at the time, and had to pass the same standards for proof as anyone else's hypothesis. It just happened that another (now) theory fit the actual measured data better. That's all. No more and no less.
So, you know, far from me to keep you from fighting crackpot crusades, if that's what keeps you feeling important. But, please... There are better ones than this kind of thing.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The error you make is in assuming that article summaries on Slashdot should be read as if they were scientific papers. The common use of the word "prove" is appropriate here. You can't remove the usage of the word from our language. I can 'prove' I have a driver's license by showing it to you. By your reasoning that wouldn't prove I had a driver's license because the claim could be false no matter how strong the evidence is.
I wonder, though, why some seem to enjoy hate-mongering so much more than others.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..