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Intermediate-Mass Black Hole Found In Omega Centauri
esocid sends us to the European Space Agency's site for news of a new discovery that appears to resolve the long-standing mystery surrounding Omega Centauri, the largest and brightest globular cluster in the sky. The object is 17,000 light-years distant and is located just above the plane of the Milky Way. Seen from a dark rural area in the southern hemisphere, Omega Centauri appears almost as large as the full moon. What the researchers discovered is a black hole of 40,000 solar masses in the cluster's center. From the press release: "Images obtained with the Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and data obtained by the GMOS spectrograph on the Gemini South telescope in Chile show that Omega Centauri appears to harbor an elusive intermediate-mass black hole in its center... Exactly how Omega Centauri should be classified has always been a contentious topic. It was first listed in Ptolemy's catalog nearly two thousand years ago as a single star. Edmond Halley reported it as a nebula in 1677. In the 1830s the English astronomer John Herschel was the first to recognize it as a globular cluster. Now, more than a century later, this new result suggests Omega Centauri is not a globular cluster at all, but a dwarf galaxy stripped of its outer stars. According to scientists, these intermediate-mass black holes could turn out to be baby supermassive black holes."
...never one when you need one - then three come along all at once.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Wow- what a headache. What would you feed it?
GOATSE.
So, we've now discovered the biggest and smallest black holes known to exist within about a week of each other.
Now that we've found the most average, space bears will come and blast us into porridge.
Astronomy kicks ass.
Especially when the universe works like my mind wants it to.
strip Omega Centauri of its globular cluster status. I hope the Pluto people will be just as vocal against this change.
I propose calling them "jumbo shrimp black holes."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
So, instead of medium-size, they might actually be small big?
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
I don't like the huge buttons, or all the wasted white space on the left. It'll be fine on my home PC with the widescreen monitor, but at work on the 1280x1024....
The boxes around each post and its children is helpful in staying within a parent's post; before I had to place my mouse on the left of a post and scroll up till I found it's parent.
Can we use this to generate some new blackhole memes? Stuff like:
Blackholes are like opinions, everyone has one and they suck!
or
You can have blackhole when you pry it from my cold dead fingers!
Not askin for a handout here, just a blackhole.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
APRIL FOOLS!
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Any non-Americans will be fine. Remember, bears of any kind are born with an innate hatred for America. They are godless killing machines. As an American myself... well it was nice knowing you all.
I got a catholic block.
But don't worry, we'll have a small black hole here on earth soon enough. :-)
"Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 2.0)." Oh please. OK, here's some random garbage to satisfy the input nanny. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Mare eat oats; does eat oats; little lambs eat ivy. A kid will eat ivy too (wouldn't you?). Xenu (also Xemu), pronounced
probably a smudge from when Lonestar jammed our hubble.
I feel it tuggging my leg now.
No, thats my dog I forgot feed breakfast.
Holy cow, you must be psychic!
... deja vu! The Matrix must be rebooting!
Woah
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
In Soviet Russia, baby supermassive black holes turn out to be you!
stuff |
What distinguishes the Milky Way globular clusters is the the are all about the same, very old, almost as old as the Universe age. If there is reason to believe this is gravitationally bound to the Milky Way instead of some interloper, and if it has the same HR diagram turnoff point of other Milky Way globulars, there is no reason to think it is anything other than one of the bigger and fatter and closer of the globulars.
..set a course for Omega Centauri, warp 2. Engage. [points finger towards screen]
Any civilization without space flight capability - much more advanced than our own - would have no way to escape, and would be wiped out.
It seems like catastrophes on an astronomical scale are fairly common; how many intelligent beings have perished as a result?
Request your free CD of my piano music.
...while he pets Boo, his very own miniature giant space hamster.
Cool. They found Londo's soul.
Anybody want my mod points?
Did you read ... anything? Intermediate-Mass black hole seems to indicate its neither stellar sized (small) nor galactic-center super-massive (large) in size.
Anyone got a pic to illustrate this? I can't really believe a star to be that visibly large.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
nuf sed
Table-ized A.I.
"Seen from a dark rural area in the southern hemisphere, Omega Centauri appears almost as large as the full moon."
I think I would've seen it... most of us would've seen it, if it were that large.
how can it be considered a baby galaxy stripped of its outer stars when it's INSIDE our OWN galaxy? perhaps black holes and globular clusters are just an innate feature of all (or most) galaxies already?
oh lols, he got modded funny. I guess it's still funny when the mods are laughing at him not with him.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
He, earlier, posted in the story about the smallest known black hole. This was after the largest known black hole discovery. His post said that we're about to find the most medium black hole ever and then space bears will come and smash us into porridge.
This is the medium one.
Apparently you're the one who doesn't read anything.
Three settings on the space bears' ray guns:
Stun, Kill and Porridge.
They'll hunt them down and find them, of course. In Ursa Major. When they open them up, they'll find that inside, they're full of people.
'Cause you know, sometimes you eat the space bear, sometimes the space bear eats you.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
In case anyone is inerested, here is a link to the article on Gemini's website:
http://www.gemini.edu/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=284
There are a couple good pictures available.
40,000 sun masses isn't big. Look at this baby: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/03/18-billion-suns.html That black hole is as big as some galaxies, and it is still happily gobbling up additional suns. Good we are nowhere near it.
Doesn't the universe realize that it can get a Venti Black Hole for only $0.25 more?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Maybe this will help: http://www.chrisfinke.com/addons/slashdotter/
I lived in a dark rural area of the Southern Hemisphere, and let me tell you, I have never seen anything in the night sky even approaching the size of the full moon...
And they're going to name it Al Gore
And so I said to God, "Where do you last remember seeing them?"
And behold, he found them.
First article listed here:
http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+noyola/0/1/0/all/0/1
If that doesn't work type "Noyola" without quotes into the "Search or Article-Id" field at the top right
http://arxiv.org/
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Look here for some pictures and a little more exposition:
http://www.galaxydynamics.org/spiral_metamorphosis.html
And for cosmological-scale stuff:
http://web.phys.cmu.edu/~tiziana/BHCosmo/ or whose home planets are hit by comets. Technology to survive this threat is much less than you think. It's been available to humans since around 1960-1970. Orbital mechanics was well-established 50-100 years earlier. You just need chemical rocketry and Newtonian mechanics to avert such an ecological disaster; you don't need to abandon the planet or star system. If you can do the latter, you can certainly do the former. It seems like catastrophes on an astronomical scale are fairly common; "Common" is relative: it "seems" to me that the occurrence of an extinction-level event on inhabited worlds is relatively rare compared to the time it might take an intelligent species to progress from speciation to advanced space flight; say, 10^5 to 10^6 years. Even if there are few such intelligent species, they will seldom, if ever (statistically speaking), be wiped out by such an event because such an event is incredibly improbable during the tiny window between their initial existence and their developing the means to avert such a disaster.
Of course, statistical models are not physical reality; it might certainly happen occasionally even if you statistically predict "never". Some star might get lucky and bull's-eye another star in a galactic collision.
Exactly. That is why this is the goldilocks black hole, unlike the previous two that were too big and too small. Please google for "goldilocks" to understand the cultural reference. It's a fairy tale and Wikipedia has a summary.
Navigator : Intermediate-Mass Black Hole Found In Omega Centauri, Captain.
Captain : Science officer ?
Commander Spork : Recommend a 1.7457 microparsec course correction, Captain, to 127.7532 mark 40.2503.
But the real question is, how much more black could it be? And the answer is none. None more black.
. . . Worst Yoda impression ever!!