Black Hole Swallows Star

Thorfinn.au writes "The New Scientist writes a conjectural piece to explain the light pattern of SCP 06F6 in what was first identified as a supernova — but observations show a skewed and stretched light curve not fitting with an current theoretical explanation of exploding stars. Also, the discussion in the comments is interesting."

Comments

"discussion in the comments"

[Anonymous Coward]

and you couldn't summarize the "discussion in the comments" in the summary because...

Re:"discussion in the comments"

[stupid_is]

Probably cos it mostly now reads:

This comment breached our terms of use and has been removed.

All according to plan

[null etc.]

I guess Samantha Carter's plan worked!

Re:All according to plan

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank god we didn't listen to McKay.

new research shows

[wjh31]

over 50% of black holes in the western hemisphere are clinically obese. It's though that the high availability and low cost of stars is to blame. Ejection of gas is one of the many unfortunate side-effects.

Re:new research shows

[noundi]

The messed up part is that now these obese black holes are entitled 2 seats when traveling by wormhole.

repaired Hubble Telescope may come in handy here

[MollyB]

from the last paragraph of tfa:

Gaensicke hopes one of Hubble's new cameras, the Wide Field Camera 3, which was installed on the last space shuttle mission to visit the telescope, could reveal more about the object's origins. The camera may be able to spot a host galaxy around the object that was too faint to see with other instruments.

As our instrumentation improves, we'll probably have many more head-scratching discoveries...

Maybe we'll get a chance to see this happen!

[TheLeopardsAreComing]

Well unfortunately you cannot tell very much about what happens in this system ( wether it is a binary system or not) by what is happening with the light. You would have to look at the x-ray spectrum to be able to measure the kind of energies in the system. Chandra observatory is the best we can do at the moment... but it seems they still like to measure things in Crabs! But in the mean time, this would be cool to get some photo's of this happening!

90's flashback

[jollyreaper]

*creepy smile* black hole sun, black hole sun

Re:90's flashback

[drinkypoo]

Black Hole Sun, won't you come
And wash away the rain...

It's really a beautiful piece that has to be stood next to in order to be appreciated. The sun wasn't in the right place for me to take any brilliant photos (and all I'd have had was my cellphone) but this one at least gives you a nice clear view.

Re:90's flashback

[jollyreaper]

Wow, I never did understand that bit in the polka. It might be kind of sad that in the last few Weird Al albums, I've never heard most of the original songs. I'm getting old, huh?

You and me both. The last Weird Al parody I've heard before he did it (talking recent music) was for Amish Paradise. I had no idea what raps All About the Pentiums and White and Nerdy were based on. I consider this to be a good thing. You know what's considered artistic in rap? Buster Rimes, he has a track on GTAIV. It's a soulful little ditty called "where my money" where he goes ranting about how he's taller than a hall of midgets and if he doesn't get his cake he's gonna kill bitches and niggas, where my fucking money?

I'd like to think if MLK came back from the dead he'd go all Cosby and start smacking these idiots upside the head.

Re:90's flashback

[drinkypoo]

I'm pretty sure that Busta has a full appreciation for the complete ridiculousness of the whole affair. He's some sort of Hip-Hop Gangsta Satire in my book. Maybe I'm wrong and whoever dresses him is the genius, I don't know.

I do share your sentiment that it's a positive sign when you don't recognize pop culture references. I was being annoyed by the music in some store the other day and I caught myself saying to myself "Wow, that's worse than the Eighties!" Of course, as anyone knows, that's fucking impossible. If the seventies weren't worse than the eighties, there's no fucking way this decade has a shot at it. (The nineties? Maybe. I'm still in denial about most of it.) And so I did my best to think back and actually, it was basically the same music as the eighties, with a slightly different pace and sets of vocoder effects, voices, and samples.

Re:90's flashback

[bogjobber]

People like you make me very angry. You claim to be generally unfamiliar with popular music and rap made in the last fifteen years, and yet you somehow still think you're fit to discuss the music critically. What gives you the idea that you can speak intelligently about something you admittedly don't know a goddamn thing about?

If you actually did pay attention, and did know what you were talking about, you would know that there is a wide range of styles and traditions in hip hop. Some are quite thoughtful and intelligent, other aren't. I'm not saying you have to like hip hop, but your logic is ridiculous. Would you dismiss rock music entirely because you heard a bad Limp Bizkit song? No more soul music because of Robin Thicke?

Stop spreading ignorant trash about a culture you obviously don't understand. You are attacking a stereotype, one that exists pretty much exclusively in bitter old people. It sure makes you look like an asshole to all of us who do understand hip hop culture.

could someone please explain

[v1]

Gaensicke and colleagues envision two scenarios that might explain the object. In one, a carbon-rich star gets too close to a middle- or heavy-weight black hole, which tears the star apart. Some of this material is absorbed by the black hole, and some is blasted away in a flare that was eventually seen from Earth as SCP 06F6.

I'm not educated in astrophysics and everytime I read something like this I wonder, how does anything manage to get "blasted away" from a black hole? I was under the impression anything that got close to it was absorbed?

Re:could someone please explain

[samcan]

One possible way would be a jet of energy streaming from a rotating black hole...

Wikipedia article.

Re:could someone please explain

[Xeriar]

I'm not educated in astrophysics and everytime I read something like this I wonder, how does anything manage to get "blasted away" from a black hole? I was under the impression anything that got close to it was absorbed?

Simple, black holes are very messy eaters - they radiate a significant fraction of their food as photons. Keep in mind you are accelerating much of the star to a significant fraction of c, letting it collide with itself. This goes double for stellar mass black holes - you have a million+ kilometer star getting 'swallowed' by a twenty kilometer black hole. Even a perfect landing is going to result in most of the star's mass getting flung back out into space if only because the hole is smaller than the core of the star.

Re:could someone please explain

[John Hasler]

Anything that crosses the event horizon is absorbed. Anything that does not interacts gravitationally with the black hole as it would with any other massive object. Black holes don't have any sort of magical ability to suck things in. All they have is gravity (Well, ok. They also have charge and spin.)

Re:could someone please explain

[tjonnyc999]

The common view that a black hole has a definite "boundary" beyond which nothing can escape, although essentially true, overlooks several important factors.
Yes, the "event horizon" (EH) is the boundary beyond which nothing can escape the gravitational pull of the black hole.
However, it's not a physical boundary (black holes do not have a physical surface), it's the mathematically-calculated boundary beyond which events inside the EH cannot affect an outside observer. As a particle gets closer to the EH, its chances of escape shrink to infinity, and once the EH is crossed, it's effectively gone from the outside world.
That being said, under certain conditions, particles can be radiated outward from a black hole:
1.) If an object inside the "photon sphere" (Schwartzchild Radius X 1.5) but still outside the EH emits photons, those photons can still escape. (Photons coming inbound are screwed, though. Approaching on a tangent, have a slim chance to "bounce off" due to rotational gain.).
2.) If the black hole is rotating, and a particle is approaching the black hole at a tangent, it may also escape via "stealing" some of the rotational energy.
3.) Rotating black holes also emit particles via Hawking radiation, which is more of a particle-antiparticle explanation that I want to get into here.

So, yeah, it's sort of an issue of semantics - if you consider the zone right outside the EH a part of the black hole, then yes, things can escape from a black hole; if you take the common (and incorrect) view that a black hole has a definite "border", and discount all the fun stuff that's going on around the black hole, then no, nothing can escape.

(Of course, this is a ridiculously simplified explanation, and I do expect at least one Slashdot astrophysicist to poke it full of holes (pun intended).)

Re:could someone please explain

[tjonnyc999]

Oh damn, forgot to include the relativistic jet. Idioth. Anyhoo... black hole spins, drags stellar gas / dust / occasional star towards it (accretion disk, om nom nom), things spin around faster than the speed of light (yes, FTL. Objects can't move faster than speed of light, but regions of spacetime can move FTL relative to other regions), eventually the sheer rotational energy + radiation forces the particles outward in a thin jet, perpendicular to the accretion disk, which can be as long as tens of thousands of parsecs. There's enough junk flying outward, and at high enough speed, to create its own disturbance in the Force^H^H^H^H^H spacetime continuum, in addition to the screwiness created by the black hole itself.

Re:could someone please explain

[Colonel Korn]

Gaensicke and colleagues envision two scenarios that might explain the object. In one, a carbon-rich star gets too close to a middle- or heavy-weight black hole, which tears the star apart. Some of this material is absorbed by the black hole, and some is blasted away in a flare that was eventually seen from Earth as SCP 06F6.

I'm not educated in astrophysics and everytime I read something like this I wonder, how does anything manage to get "blasted away" from a black hole? I was under the impression anything that got close to it was absorbed?

Black holes gravitationally pull matter toward them like any other object with the same mass, until you're inside the event horizon, at which point there is no escape. Thus, outside the event horizon, objects will tend to orbit the black hole just as they'd orbit a star of equal mass. Over time, the orbit of gas falling into a black hole decays and the gas falls toward the singularity and its orbital velocity increases. When this happens, the volume occupied by the orbit of the gas decreases, leading to higher density gas and thus heat generated through friction and compression. This heat raises the temperature of the gas, which increases its pressure and can result in a portion of the gas being blown off into space.

Re:could someone please explain

[Chris Burke]

All they have is gravity (Well, ok. They also have charge and spin.)

Amongst their properties are... I'll come in again.

Re:could someone please explain

[forkazoo]

Simple, black holes are very messy eaters - they radiate a significant fraction of their food as photons. Keep in mind you are accelerating much of the star to a significant fraction of c, letting it collide with itself. This goes double for stellar mass black holes - you have a million+ kilometer star getting 'swallowed' by a twenty kilometer black hole. Even a perfect landing is going to result in most of the star's mass getting flung back out into space if only because the hole is smaller than the core of the star.

Simple analogy I sometimes use to explain black hole emissions in a way most people are familiar with...

Ever flush a toilet and notice a splash that jumps above the rim? Same thing.

While the majority of the mass gets pulled into the hole, the chaotic nature of the flow means that some mass gets ejected every which way. Depending on where you are situated, the ejected material can be quite noticeable.

Re:I'm not scientist

[wjh31]

gravitational lensing happens on the scale of galaxies and galaxy clusters.

The cow says "mooooo!"

[MoldySpore]

The star says "Shine shine shine!"

The black hole says "NOM NOM NOM!!!!"

...Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Re:The cow says "mooooo!"

[the donner party]

I thought the star would say "Run, Coward, Run!"

Because it's not interesting.

[argent]

Aside from all the "This comment breached our terms of use and has been removed" messages, most of the comments are by kooks or people who clearly misunderstood the article (like the guy who saw a 2s flare in Delphinus).

Re:Because it's not interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahhh, so it's like the comments on Slashdot when any topic comes up?

Fixed that for you!

Re:Because it's not interesting.

[BLQWME]

I know there is a hemmorhoid joke in here somewhere.

Re:Because it's not interesting.

[OldSoldier]

One of the comments I like is the fellow who complains that:

So called scientific "facts" such as, black holes, big bang, stretched space, warped space, spacetime and so on,are merely flawed mathematical constructs. They have never been observed

What always strikes me with these sort of comments is the underlying belief that scientists are hiding something from the rest of us. Don't these posters realize that they're complaining about this "supposed conspiracy theory" in an article where scientists are openly admitting that they saw something they don't understand?

Re:Because it's not interesting.

[czarangelus]

The thing is, they DIDN'T see a black hole swallowing a star. They saw a massive burst of radiation. But they describe NOT what they actually observed, but their interpretation of what they observed instead. Are there no other possible sources for massive bursts of radiation than black holes swallowing stars? Given the aberrant numbers of high energy particles entering our star system, I would say it's premature indeed. Same with the neutron stars, or pulsars allegedly being stars that "rotate faster than dentist drills." The impossible is far more likely than the improbable.

Re:Because it's not interesting.

[Chris Burke]

Same with the neutron stars, or pulsars allegedly being stars that "rotate faster than dentist drills." The impossible is far more likely than the improbable.

And... what's so improbable about a massive and extremely dense object spinning rapidly, vs an even more massive but much less dense object spinning at a rate that is proportionally slower?

I'd say that the impossible, in this case violating Conservation of Angular Momentum, is usually what is far more improbable.

Re:Because it's not interesting.

[AlecC]

And nobody has actually seen an electron, a nucleus, a photon outside the visible spectrum, the other side of the moon... We infer most of the things we have "seen" from instrument readings. Of course, the body of different measurements for the electron is much greater than it is for, say, dark matter, so we have a higher confidence level in the former. But there is no qualitative difference between the two, or the other quoted things, merely the size of the pile of evidence. And even some of those things are pretty well documented.

Re:Because it's not interesting.

[stevelinton]

The article does say that someone has proposed this as the best fit to the details of the observed data, while someone has proposed something else (a massive supernova of a star surrounded by carbon dust). Dozens of other possibilities probably got considered and rejected before making the article. If you read the actual scientific papers they will likely consider many more alternatives and explain in detail why they don't fit what's observed. They will also describe in detail

If you want the raw details you need to read the papers and be prepared for some maths (in which they work out which theories fit the data and which don't). The idea that pulsars are neutron stars, for instance, emerged over several years and was confirmed as the predictions it made about what kinds of patterns would, and wouldn't be seen in pulsar radiation panned out. Many other ideas fell by the wayside.

The real data is published and discussed, multiple interpretations are considered, but in scholarly articles, not in press releases.

I felt a great disturbance

[Laser Lou]

in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Re:I'm not scientist

[Xeriar]

But wouldn't a roving black hole produce a tell-tale roving gravitational lensing?

Only if you were extremely close by or got a perfect lineup. The former, we could probably notice out to a significant fraction of a light year or so if we were watching the sky.

The latter case is rather problematic, as it would be hard to distinguish a black hole's lensing effect from noise - one frame you see a few photons, the next you don't. Was it a galaxy? A star? Nebula? Random noise?

Ooops!

[Sport89]

Looks like the inhabitants of the nearest planet just switched on their brand-new LHC...

Re:repaired Hubble Telescope may come in handy her

[SatanicPuppy]

Heh. The more you learn, the more you realize you don't know...Unless you're an asshole or a teenager. In the grand scheme, we're still just scratching the surface. There are so many things we do not understand.

Science

[kenp2002]

We are in the earliest stages of undesrtanding how the universe works. For the first 8-10 thousand years we have looked what that which is in our universe and how it functions within our universe. Only in the last 3000 years have we started to look at how the universe (or if you prefer reality) itself works.

Based on our understanding the very fundamental laws of our universe at some point has changed. The laws, as we call them, 5 seconds before the big bang may have been very different then at the time of the big bang and vastly different a billion years afterwards.

We look to oddities like black holes to try and grasp and dredge out what additional laws that may exist to better understand how to exist within a system of laws. We must be ever so careful though as we go forward in collecting and looking at data. Who knows, perhaps we will find a white hole adding mass to our universe potentially signalling an escape from heat death or the big rip. Perhaps the graviton will be found... perhaps not.

The question all this begs is crucial to the core of our own existence, and is the harbinger to the meaning of life. The question must be asked after observing this article:

How could we miss an opportunity for a sexual joke with this?

Re:Roving black hole

[Dragonslicer]

I don't seem to grasp that black holes can become mobile. I can not imagine something would be able to exert enough force on the black hole to actually accelerate it.

Other than the obvious everything-attracts-everything-else, also remember that black holes don't magically appear from nothing. Whatever matter initially created the black hole was most likely moving, and that momentum doesn't go anywhere.

Re:I'm not scientist

[Gunnut1124]

um, wasn't it first discovered using the sun?

I could have sworn that something like that happened in 1919 when a guy named Arthur Eddington kinda helped confirm the theory for Einstein. Proximity allowed us to see the lensing, which we can't easily see from a distance, but it's there on all objects of sufficient mass, not just galaxies.

I've never seen a Dup this close...

[Culture20]

after the original. Posted less than an hour apart, right next to each other on the front page!

Has Bing Already Overtaken Yahoo? Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday June 08, @08:54AM
Black Hole Swallows Star Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday June 08, @09:38AM

And Taco posted both of them. Getting old, Taco?

Misleading headline

[imgod2u]

There's nothing in the article about Paris Hilton.

Ambiguous

[ChrisMaple]

Are these black hole swallows starring in Capistrano? Are there any chickadees?

WHO said it WAS a black hole?

[argent]

The scientists gave a number of possible interpretations. The journalist who wrote the article, or his editor, picked the most interesting-sounding explanation for the thrust of the article.

I think anyone familiar with Slashdot summaries should be aware of this distinction.

Bad Title

[Quaoar]

Quoth the conclusion of the referenced paper:

"These possibilities, combined with the observation that the
disrupted object be a carbon-rich star, rather than a normal
main sequence one appear to make the case for tidal disruption
somewhat contrived. Nonetheless, with only one object, and
thus an essentially unconstrained rate and space density for
such events, it remains a possibility."

So, while tidal disruption is a possibility, it is not the favored scenario.

ATTN: Slashdot Monitor, Galactic Navigators Guild

[Will.Woodhull]

Quoting this for your attention just in case (once again) your filter software fails to pick up on a communication whose existence your Guild would prefer to ignore:

The thing is, they DIDN'T see a black hole swallowing a star. They saw a massive burst of radiation. But they describe NOT what they actually observed, but their interpretation of what they observed instead. Are there no other possible sources for massive bursts of radiation than black holes swallowing stars? Given the aberrant numbers of high energy particles entering our star system, I would say it's premature indeed. Same with the neutron stars, or pulsars allegedly being stars that "rotate faster than dentist drills."

Can it be any more clear that the indigenous technosavvies of this backward planet are about to see through the ruses you have been feeding them, and recognize the artifacts of your warp ship accelerations for what they are? How long do you think you can preserve that foolish fiction of a "Hubble Constant Universe" you've been encouraging them to accept?

Would it really be that costly for you to exercise a little more control over your thrust vectors? Yes, it would cut into the profits of each voyage by several tenths of a percent. But that is a pittance to pay for this unique opportunity to study a pre-Warp and pre-Contact civilization during that critical period just prior to its recognition of the bubble distortion at its heliopause. We've only had one such opportunity before. Need I remind you of how your Guild mucked up that one?