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Astronomers Dissect a Supermassive Black Hole
Matt_dk sends along a piece from the European Southern Observatory, which reports on observations of the so-called "Einstein Cross," a fortuitous conjunction of a nearby galaxy and a distant black hole. A team of researchers from Europe and the US combined the effects of macrolensing (from the intervening galaxy) and microlensing (from stars in that galaxy), captured by an earth-bound telescope. "Combining a double natural 'magnifying glass' with the power of ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have scrutinized the inner parts of the disc around a supermassive black hole 10 billion light-years away. They were able to study the disc with a level of detail a thousand times better than that of the best telescopes in the world, providing the first observational confirmation of the prevalent theoretical models of such discs."
And were never seen again.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
the article makes absolutely no mention of glaciers melting in the dead of night.
At least they'd be able to say they worked closely together on the issue.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The new fox special: "Where did it come from? was this the child of the LHC? which shadowy government agency was responable for its capture? all will be reviled in Black Hole autopsy, tonight on fox!"
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
It has not been that long since people first discovered such quasars, and at that time they seemed destined to remain a mega-distant mystery. In the mean time astronomers have accumulated a large body of results on gravitational lensing, which itself is a prediction of Einstein's not-too-old general theory of relativity. Now this technique has been used to form a galatic-cluster-scale configuration that acts as a telescope which can bring us images of this extreme level of detail from across the visible universe. We live in a very exciting period for the science of astronomy.
The question is where they'd get a large enough scalpel to dissect a supermassive black hole?
And yet sharp enough to dissect a singularity.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
It's sort of as if by combining a double natural 'magnifying glass' with the power of ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have scrutinized the inner parts of a car 10 billion light-years away. They were able to study the car with a level of detail a thousand times better than that of the best telescopes in the world, providing the first observational confirmation of the prevalent theoretical models of such cars.
Hope that helps!
The enemies of Democracy are
... seriously. This would be such a great accessory for the scientifically-minded. It's a nice, distinctive-looking piece of science. Wear it as an atheist as a statement about religion; wear it next to your christian cross as a non-atheist as a statement about rational spirituality. Whatever - I just think someone could make a nice piece of thoughtful jewelery out of this.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Several responses to your post:
"...wait for 10 billion years...": no, whatever happened seems to have happened some 10 billion years _ago_.
"...convergence of fake radiation...": although the 10-billion-year-old events are still quite open to argument, the astronomers observed _real_ radiation from them.
"...fricken verifiable data closer to earth...": any slashdotter can tell you that you'll get your nearby black hole data just a few dozen milliseconds after the LHC starts working.
Some gravitational lensing configurations do, in fact, produce a ring. As you might expect, though, such perfect alignment is pretty rare, and you usually get partial arcs or smeared out blobs.
I'm not knowledgeable about the exact reason for the cross configuration is, but the unusual effects of gravitational lensing are often due to the fact that the lens (a massive galaxy, in most cases) isn't a perfect point source, so the optical effects are somewhat surprising.