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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."
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.
-- Intelligence is soluble in alcohol
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...
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!
*creepy smile* black hole sun, black hole sun
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The star says "Shine shine shine!"
The black hole says "NOM NOM NOM!!!!"
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
One possible way would be a jet of energy streaming from a rotating black hole...
Wikipedia article.
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).
Looks like the inhabitants of the nearest planet just switched on their brand-new LHC...
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.
I am a science fantasy fan
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.)
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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).)
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?
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
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.
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.
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.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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.
America is all about speed. Hot, nasty, badass speed. -Eleanor Roosevelt, 1936
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?
All they have is gravity (Well, ok. They also have charge and spin.)
Amongst their properties are... I'll come in again.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.