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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
Just about anything, really.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
It must have a lot of gas.
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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.
Personally, I like feeing it trolls. But more just keep popping up.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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I imagine the speculation goes something like this: The dwarf galaxy that is now Omega Centauri collided with the Milky Way, which cannibalized most of the dwarf's stars and sent its star-forming nebulae into the intergalactic void. All that was left of the dwarf was a massive globular cluster.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
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
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.
Voilà. It looks that large, apparently, because it's about 100 light years across.
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.