Black Hole Emits a 1,000-Light-Year-Wide Gas Bubble

PhrostyMcByte writes "12 million light-years away, in the outer spiral of galaxy NGC 7793, a bubble of hot gas approximately 1,000 light-years in diameter can be found shooting out of a black hole — one of the most powerful jets of energy ever seen. (Abstract available at Nature.) The bubble has been growing for approximately 200,000 years, and is expanding at around 1,000,000 kilometers per hour."

Comments

Jokes

[SilverHatHacker]

This is just begging for a "your momma" joke. Anyone want to do the honors?

Re:Jokes

[Lazareth]

Ya momma so fat that when she tried to mate with the local black hole it just went "hell no!"

Re:Jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what else just emitted a thousand light-year wide gas bubble? ...

Your Mom.

Re:Jokes

[Arthur Grumbine]

This is just begging for a "your momma" joke. Anyone want to do the honors?

Yo mama so unimaginative she can't come up with a good joke given ample material. Apparently it's hereditary.

Re:Jokes

[Lazareth]

but do you know who lit it on fire? Right,

Your mom.

Now what does that tell us about our mothers?

Re:Jokes

[Albinoman]

You sir, have earned your nerd humor merit badge.

Re:Jokes

[should_be_linear]

How about this: "Sciantists named this object "BP"

Re:Jokes

[mcneely.mike]

Ya momma's so Lesbian, she's trying to have sex with black women who tell her "hell no!".

Re:Jokes

[The Clockwork Troll]

Yo momma so fat that when I fucked her my cock redshifted.

Re:Jokes

[bell.colin]

It's OK, They will drill another Black-Hole to relieve the pressure They said it will be cleaned up soon, they promised and everything when it it was only 500 Light-Years wide.

Re:Jokes

[LifesABeach]

And then BP will have a person state that he was "born and raised" at the black hole, and my favorite statement, "i will stay till this mess is all cleaned up." Boo-ya!

Re:Jokes

[Sulphur]

Mom, is that you?

Third grade truism

[Scareduck]

He who smelt it, dealt it.

Re:Third grade truism

[Dan East]

Third grade? That one lasted me well into college.

Re:Third grade truism

[Anonymous Coward]

He who smelt it, dealt it.

Whoever denied it supplied it!

Re:Third grade truism

[PBoyUK]

Yeah but, "toilet humour" is still toilet humour even outside of the vicinity of a toilet.

Re:Third grade truism

[blair1q]

smell is chemical. therefore it's based on the interaction of electron clouds around atoms in particular configurations within molecules. therefore it acts by means of the electromagnetic force. therefore it's mediated by virtual photons. virtual photons are light. light can go only one direction in a black hole, and that's down. so the black hole can't smell it because the virtual photons of its nose can't interact with the virtual photons of the gas outside the black hole to indicate that there are electrons, atoms, and molecules there.

so there, smartypants.

Re:Third grade truism

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Can somebody tell "slide rule" here, that Mr. Science left the building, about an hour ago?

It's now fart jokes, "all the way down."

Re:Third grade truism

[Anonymous Coward]

He who said the rhyme, did the crime...

Re:Third grade truism

[Anonymous Coward]

Han Solo is that you?

Re:Third grade truism

[smash]

College in the US, right?

Re:Third grade truism

[MakinBacon]

so the black hole can't smell it because the virtual photons of its nose can't interact with the virtual photons of the gas outside the black hole to indicate that there are electrons, atoms, and molecules there.

Also because it doesn't have a nose.

Re:Third grade truism

[blair1q]

The nose is a metaphor for a vessel for chemical interaction. Your nose and my nose are two different objects, no more or less than our noses and a black hole's nose are three different objects. The effect of them is the same. Chemical reaction.

What it lacks is a trained palate.

Sucked Too Much?

[imscarr]

Maybe it sucked up too much matter and had to fart?

Re:Sucked Too Much?

[Goboxer]

That is what happens when black holes suck up too much of element 16.

Re:Sucked Too Much?

[LordLimecat]

Sulfur isnt what causes gas, guy.

Re:Sucked Too Much?

[dov_0]

Or burp.... "Bwaaaaaaaarpp!! Aaah. Sorry, eaten too much!"

Re:Sucked Too Much?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Maybe it sucked up too much matter and had to fart?

Funny but true. Jets from black holes aren't the hole emitting matter. They're the part of the accretion disk of infalling matter which gets caught in the spinning magnetic field near the black hole's poles and is propelled away from the hole at extreme velocity. Meanwhile the infalling matter, "circling the drain", spins up the black hole further as it is finally captured.

So jets like these are produced by the combination of the hole having a strong mag field when it formed with a lot of infalling matter adding more angular momentum to more than replace what's lost flinging off the matter and energy in the polar jets.

It wasn't the black hole...!

[Braintrust]

...Sirius did it!

Re:It wasn't the black hole...!

[sharkey]

No, it was Snape!

Re:It wasn't the black hole...!

[Culture20]

For the astronomically impaired: Sirius is the "dog star"

Re:It wasn't the black hole...!

[nofx_3]

Whoever smelt it dealt it.

Re:It wasn't the black hole...!

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you DIgg it!

The Magical Planet

[Kingrames]

You eat just ONE bean-shaped planet...

Re:The Magical Planet

[Alcoholist]

...and no other galaxy wants to be in the room.

very minor issue

[Lazareth]

A minor issue with the headline (of both the summary and the article) is that the black hole does not really emit the gas bubble per se. It is emitting jets of extremely fast moving particles which then hits nearby interstella gas. Obviously this causes an increase in temperature, creating a "snowball" effect resulting in the aforementioned 1000-light-year-wide (flaming) gas bubble.

Re:very minor issue

[SnarfQuest]

It sounds like someone at a drunken frat party playing one of those "look at this" games with a match.

Do we need to call an ambulance for this one too?

Re:very minor issue

[Lazareth]

Don't worry, this happens all the time at physicist frat parties. It helps to weed out the livestock.

Re:very minor issue

[Anonymous Coward]

I never thought I'd see such furor over a minor god taking a shit.

Re:very minor issue

[Anonymous Coward]

INTERSTELLA! INTERSTELLA!

How can a black hole emit anything?

[Unoti]

I'm sorry if this is a really dumb question, but how can a black hole emit much of anything? I thought they couldn't emit light, any anything else, not even information.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Rene S. Hollan]

No, but the combination of gravity and magnetism means they can whip up a lot of stuff outside the event horizon and direct it outward along the poles.

Further, stuff that does fall in adds it's angular momentum to that of the hole, and a spinning black hole has both an inner and outer event horizon. Stuff can fall through one and still escape the other, IIRC, removing angular momentum from the hole.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[InterGuru]

The phraseology in the article is misleading. The energy and gas jets are emitted as matter falls towards the black hole and becomes superheated from the falling. Once the matter crosses the boundary ( event horizon ) into the back hole itself it disappears from the rest of the universe.

Information is released, but very very slowly.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[sexconker]

They can emit Hawking radiation.

Basically, pairs of particles appear out of nowhere for extremely brief amounts of time, fly around a bit, then collide together and disappear again.

(Yes, this happens. Matter appears out of nowhere and then disappears again.)

If this pair of particles pops into existence just outside the event horizon of a black hole, there's a chance that, in their brief flying about, one will cross the event horizon and the other will not. Since they're no disjoint, they don't disappear like they normally do.

The particle that is on the outside of the event horizon escapes as Hawking radiation.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[HungryHobo]

also, don't ask me why, it apparently tends to be the anti-matter particle which gets pulled into the black hole which eliminates some of the black holes mass.... or something like that.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[blair1q]

Not so much emit as throw away, as a fat kid does with the a wrapper around a candy bar.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

An inner and outer event horizon? last I checked the event horizon was the point at which nothing not even light escapes. By that definition theres only one event horizon. If something goes in and is able to come out, it obviously hasn't entered the event horizon. I assume what you are talking about is the gravitational swing effect by which an object enters the gravitational field long enough to gain speed before it is slingshots away before being sucked in.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[jdb2]

An inner and outer event horizon? last I checked the event horizon was the point at which nothing not even light escapes. By that definition theres only one event horizon. If something goes in and is able to come out, it obviously hasn't entered the event horizon. I assume what you are talking about is the gravitational swing effect by which an object enters the gravitational field long enough to gain speed before it is slingshots away before being sucked in.

I think he's talking about the ergosphere.

jdb2

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[BitZtream]

I love how people talk about black holes like they know how they work.

It always amazes me that both laymen and scientists as well talk about such things as if we KNOW whats going on.

We don't. We have theories. I assure you, without a bit of doubt, that should we ever get close enough to a black whole to actually uncover its secrets we will be utterly if not completely wrong about our understanding of them.

We don't know how they work, stop pretending we do, all we have is some observations made based on assumptions that other theories are correct, ignoring the fact that these underlying theories and the theories about black holes themselves don't even all actually add up without us throwing in random tweaks for reasons we don't have the slightest understanding of.

We don't know shit about black holes, even if we have seen a couple drive in movies that talked about them in the cosmos.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Rene S. Hollan]

Yes, I've heard the outer ergosphere boundary referred to as an apparent event horizon. I was not referring to ordinary gravitational slingshots.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[DragonWriter]

I'm sorry if this is a really dumb question, but how can a black hole emit much of anything? I thought they couldn't emit light, any anything else, not even information.

The dominant theoretical model of black holes has them emitting energy (Hawking radiation).

Though I don't think the effect here is really the black hole emitting anything (from within the event horizon), but an instead an effect that occurs because of gravitational compression outside the event horizon.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[DragonWriter]

I love how people talk about black holes like they know how they work.

It always amazes me that both laymen and scientists as well talk about such things as if we KNOW whats going on.

We don't. We have theories.

In science, its important to remember that a "theory" is not the same thing as the loose definition of a theory in casual conversation, or some technical but non-scientific contexts (literary criticism, I'm looking at you.)

In science, a theory is a hypothesis whose predictions which make it falsifiable have withstood testing and which remains viable. The casual-conversation concept of "theory" as an plausible but unverified idea about the world is what in science would be a conjecture or a hypothesis, not a theory.

So, often, we talk about theories (as opposed to mere conjectures or hypotheses) as if they were known except in very particular contexts where there theoretical nature is particularly important (such as in the case of a conflict between two theories that have both withstood scrutiny but where the predictions each makes in conditions impractical to test conflict.) But there's a good reason for that: if it is a "theory" as the term is used in science, it has demonstrated it power in explaining behavior beyond that which was consulted to formulate it. It may need to be refined, but its known to be a useful model.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

Disclaimer: IANAP
Actually, what's going on is that You Can't Violate The Laws of Thermodynamics(TM). The event horizon is not thermodynamically special; there is no sharp change in average kinetic energy there. So, if temperate on both sides approaches the same value, particles have to travel in both directions from the radius of the event horizon. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation#Emission_process) It happens that Nature is constrained by the mechanisms She allows herself without violating Her own, other laws, so we see matter-antimatter pairs at work.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

LoLZ!!!! d00D, don't u no they is throwing out all dat Hawking's?? Raaaaar-teex blod, u get me??

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Randle_Revar]

No, antimatter does not have antimass. And it is 50/50 as to which of the pair falls into the black hole. But for that formerly virtual particle to now exist as a "regular" particle it's energy has to come from somewhere, and in this case, "somewhere" is the black hole. I believe that this is one of those points where to go further, you need to get into the actual math.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

If we don't know anything about them, then isn't is equally likely that we are correct about them?

Also, our information on black holes is the best we can do with what we can test. It's important to have these theories, without them we can never further our knowledge. What we can do without is people shitting all over theories based soley on the fact that they are theories. You're saying we shouldn't discuss what we think we understand about black holes because we can't send you up to personally observe one? Rubbish.

Also "utterly" and "completely" are pretty much the same thing. There's no reason to be redundant.

Honestly, it just sounds like you're pissed off that you don't understand what's being discussed.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[shaitand]

"The casual-conversation concept of "theory" as an plausible but unverified idea about the world is what in science would be a conjecture or a hypothesis, not a theory."

This is oft repeated garbage. Worse is the saying that a theory is essentially a scientific fact. A theory is no more a hypothesis which has withstood testing. All theories remain best guesses consistent with the observations seen to date and completely disposable tomorrow. In fact, there have been many theories which HAVE been tossed out in favor of new theories. In fact, there are multiple conflicting theories in many areas.

Acting as if theories are somehow more than the current best guess(es) of the scientific method is throwing out the skepticism that is the core of said method. It simply isn't worth throwing out science for the sake of dismissing the flippant "it's just a theory" remarks.

And don't bother with "technically that's true but..." technically that's true invalidates the but you'd be tempted to tack on the end. Period.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

You must remember that a "black hole" represents a super massive stellar body, forming the most heaviest elements, and presumably most unstable elements, currently unknown. With all that subparticle interaction present in such a scenario, photons will be emitted that might eventually escape the "inner" event horizon via the "magnetic poles".

Besides that, at the outer event horizon, matter, even photons will be captured and, based on the "magnetic field", ejected from the "magnetic poles" as a constant stream of photons, while they are constantly interacting with the other matter/photons having been captured.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Rene S. Hollan]

Not likely. Nothing can escape the inner event horizon, thought he boundary is believed to be "fuzzy", so real/virtual particle creation out of the vacuum near it can have the virtual particle captured and the real one escape, with a loss of mass of the black hole.

At least, so believes Stephen Hawking.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Abcd1234]

Acting as if theories are somehow more than the current best guess(es) of the scientific method is throwing out the skepticism that is the core of said method.

Oh please, you're no better than the original poster. While you accuse the original poster of overstating the rigor of scientific theories, you massively understate it by bringing them down to the level of mere guesses. Of course, as always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but don't delude yourself into thinking that your position is at all superior to that of the OPs. You're simply taking the opposite end of the axis of credulity.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Trahloc]

Do you really insist that someone constantly tack on "with our current best guess and understanding of the universe" to every comment? That part should be covered by 'this is a science talk' vs 'this is religious dogma'. Just because some people confuse the two doesn't mean everyone who uses the word without a notation is using it wrong.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus you guys can suck -all- of the humor out of a fart joke.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look at the black hole from the other side, it's brown.
It's a fact that brown holes pass gas all the time.
So, the even is perfectly normal, just on a universal level.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[shaitand]

Uses a word without a notation? He didn't skip a notation, he issued about how a theory our current best guess and understanding of the universe.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a hint: if you call yourself a guru (as your nickname would imply) and come into a forum correcting people, using large words doesn't help your case. Especially if you use them wrong. The term you are looking for is the more common "wording." Phraseology is the study of multi-word colloquialisms.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Saysys]

Actually theories are abstractions of the relationships between concepts that are only indirectly-measurable, while hypothesis are the more concrete understanding of the world derived from empirical evidence and link that which is measurable to that which is not. Without some level of indirect-measurement required there is no need for a theory, we would simply have fact... such as the fact of microbial evolution, the fact that DNA exists and so forth.

This means that theory is not something verifiable through observation, but a systematic method of understanding complex reality in a way that is parsimoniously comprehensible. If competing theories have also yet to be disproved then there is no 'right' theory, only a trade off between utility and falsifiability -> the more general the theory, the less well it is defined concretely through variables and hypothesis -> the better it is at abstracting reality and the worse it is at being falsifiable.

The point being that a "theory" is neither the super-hypothesis that you seem to think it is, nor is it the half-witted conjecture that the gpp thinks it is.

It is a multidimensional abstraction of reality that, while useful for explanation and at some point empirically disprovable, must reside at some level of abstraction and thus make trade offs between its usefulness and dis-provability.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Sulphur]

That is because they are smart fellers.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Tom]

It always amazes me that both laymen and scientists as well talk about such things as if we KNOW whats going on.

We don't. We have theories.

In science, "theory" has a very different meaning. If you talk on the street and say something is a "theory", you mean it's unproven, an idea, it could work like that but you're not sure. Scientists call that a "hypothesis". A theory in science is as close to fact as we'll ever come (since science is always open for learning).

It's the same mistake the ID fanatics exploit. Evolution is not a "theory" in the common-sense meaning of the word, only in the scientific meaning.

In other words: Yes, we know what's going on, at least as far as current science and instruments permit. Which is always several orders of magnitude and sometimes tens of orders of magnitude larger than any other human attempt to explain the world. Most current scientific theories are correct to more decimal places than your pocket calculator can display. Given that religion, magic, superstition, intuition, "common sense" and all the other modes of explanation have a great day if they're correct to one decimal place, and routinely score worse than chance, the argument "it is only a theory", aka "yes, but here in the 20th decimal place we are not really certain, are we?" is patently ridiculous.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Trahloc]

The notation comment was meant to imply that most of us don't need "theory" notated to explain which definition is being used. The person he replied to used it in its proper context, he was just too dense to get it. Perhaps my writing skill is too crappy to convey what I meant to say, ahwell.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hawking Radiation.
Quantum mechanics figured into classical black hole dynamics. Particles can "quantum teleport" outside the event horizon, plus the Event Horizon fluctuates at the quantum level. It's the same reason there are no quantum black holes, they radiated their mass away.A black hole with 10^9 grams mass will last only about 0.1 seconds. That's a LOT of energy radiated.

See Hawking's paper "Black Holes Aren't Black" (1975 or thereabouts. He could still talk back then.)
Or Jerry Pournelle's more whimsical scoop "Fuzzy black holes have no hair"(Galaxy,Jan 1975) Pournelle, Niven and Robert Forward were at Steven Hawking's CalTech lecture & JP's magazine article was published first.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[owlstead]

I would like to add that this kind of Hawking radiation is extremely slow process and that it has nothing to do with giant fireballs escaping from black holes as such. Or, very probably, anything else we can detect.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[b4dc0d3r]

When "science" talks about things as if it knows what's going on, it doesn't pretend that it knows what's going on. It talks, as you said your self "as if it knows what's going on." That is, that this is our current understanding. Science evolves, and we talk about it as we know it, instead of talking about it as the latest studies which have been peer reviewed and replicated and not retracted seem to indicate that we might have a valid theory about it - because that's all implied.

The problem people have with science is that grade school teaches science two ways. Either you get the "this is science, shut up and memorize" class, or you get the "we have no idea how any of this works, we just bang stuff around and try to describe what we think is happening" class. The former seems to produce journalists and slashdot editors.

One week, chocolate is good for you, the next it's bad, then it's good again. This seems like science is wrong, until you realize that it's rarely the same cause. "Chocolate is bad" because it has fat. It's good says the next headline, because it has phenyl ethylamine and aromatherapeutic mood elevation. It's bad because it comes packaged with sugar, it raises good cholesterol, it's a sstimulant, and on and on. This is just poor reporting and omission. If people were honest, they would say we have found one more positive or negative quality of chocolate in addition to the current list which includes..... Or because people can require different nutritional requirements, we can be neutral and say we have found an additional property of chocolate. Keep in mind, however, that the scientific report which underpins the sensationalistic headlines probably uses words like "may" and "is thought to" and "possibly". If we talk like this all the time we'd never get anything done, so we don't.

So journalism, and school, and people versed in the art, say things as if they are facts, as a matter of shorthand. It is a shame that more people fail to understand this, and it leads to headlines like "Black Hole Emits..." No it didn't, and gp's explanation uses our current understanding to explain why. 30 years from now, that explanation will seem coarse and uninformed, but it will likely be no more incorrect than referring to a (net) positively charged collection of quarks as a proton.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

The really fat ones eat the wrapper too.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[t14m4t]

Several other comments talk about a pair of particles being created out of nothing, one gets absorbed and the other flies away. This is basically right, but can be confusing (the one that gets absorbed has negative energy in order to conserve energy). Here's an easier mental model....

Steve Hawking came up with an idea a while ago (70's perhaps?). He was thinking about black holes whose event horizon was around the size of an atom. Then he put it up against the Heizenberg Uncertainty Principle. He realized that particles in these black holes would have such a high degree of certainty about their position, that there would be such a low certainty about their velocity. Therefor, there would be some that would be REALLY fast. Not fast enough that they could escape the pull of the black hole, but fast enough that they could get just above the event horizon. There, they could give off a high-energy photon, and fall back in. This photon, since it was emitted outside the event horizon, would actually escape. This radiation can (and has been) detected, and causes what is known as evaporation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation#Black_hole_evaporation

Ironically, this means that smaller black holes (which have higher certainty about a particle's position) evaporate faster. Large-ish black holes absorb more energy cosmic microwave radiation than they emit in Hawking radiation, but if they have small enough mass (I believe smaller than the size of our moon), they emit more Hawking radiation than they receive from the cosmic background.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[crazyeddie740]

Actually, in philosophy of science, falsifiability has been dead for decades, thanks to the Quine-Duhem Thesis. The Quine-Duhem Thesis states that a theory never makes a prediction in isolation, but does so in conjunction with auxiliary hypotheses and propositions about initial conditions. This means that when we are faced with an observation that apparently falsifies our theory, we always have the option of "explaining away" the observation by rejecting at least one of our auxiliary hypotheses or propositions about initial conditions. (This does lead to the theory becoming more ad hoc.)

Falsifiability has pretty much been replaced by Bayesianism. Bayesianism uses Bayes' Theorem (used in many spam filters, btw), and allows us to talk about an observation confirming or disconfirming a theory. Confirmation does not mean "prove," it only means "makes more likely to be true." Same thing with disconfirmation: "makes less likely to be true," not "falsifies." This is a better fit with actual scientific practice, since scientists tend to look for evidence that confirms their theory, not evidence that fails to falsify it. But for some odd reason, philosophically aware scientists haven't gotten the memo about all of this, and they are still talking about an account of theory confirmation that's been dead for about 50 years.

Philosophers also think that you are never required to accept the results of a non-deductive argument (including the results of abduction, aka the scientific method), and you always have the option of withholding judgment. However, if you do accept a well-confirmed theory as being true, most epistemologists (who study knowledge) would agree that you are justified.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[quanticle]

This is oft repeated garbage. Worse is the saying that a theory is essentially a scientific fact. A theory is no more a hypothesis which has withstood testing.

That's true, but, frankly its a lot better than most of the "knowledge", or "common sense" out there. I'd rather base my work on a theory over common sense any day.

Acting as if theories are somehow more than the current best guess(es) of the scientific method is throwing out the skepticism that is the core of said method.

There are different levels of skepticism, you know. The type of nihilistic skepticism you're advocating is just as unproductive as the blind acceptance that religion advocates. If every scientist had to start directly from first principles, then no progress would ever be made. To paraphrase Newton, one only sees farther than others by standing on the shoulders of giants.

More generally, if we had to doubt and verify every piece of information that came before us, we would not have any time to actually use that information to construct useful artifacts.

And don't bother with "technically that's true but..." technically that's true invalidates the but you'd be tempted to tack on the end. Period.

Writing out the word, "period" invalidates any statement that occurs before it.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Genda]

There are all kinds of things that can cause a black hole to emit light. Hawking's Radiation for one. The powerful jets at either pole of a black hole result when it is feeding, and large amounts of matter build up in an accretion disk. Incredibly powerful magnetic fields are created by ionized plasma moving at relativistic speeds, and these field create powerful polarized beams of energetic particles, we see as jets and gamma ray bursts.

The accretion disk itself can emit a tremendous amount of energy.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Hurricane78]

Technically that is not emission. Since the “emitted” particle of the pair never was inside the event horizon at any time. It just came close enough for its partner to get swallowed and then escaped.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Hurricane78]

Man, you missed such a great opportunity for a “yo momma” joke!

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Saysys]

It's the Quine part of the QDT that has the real problem.

You see, an epistemological assumption that we can never know truth comes either from a limitation of human conscience or from an ontological assumption that there is no truth to be found.

In reality, there is a reality, there is truth, we are simply constrained by our human limitations when it comes to interpreting it.

If you read what I said I didn't argue that pure falsifiability can be obtained any more than the pure utility of a theory can be obtained; simply that these are theoretical anchor points on which the continuum of theory lies.

Remember: objective, not subjective, Bayesian inferences are what have brought us to the spam filters, etc.

Imagery

[Dan East]

Is that an actual image, or an artist's rendition? Why is the bubble of gas so spherical? I would have expected it to be asymmetrical.

Re:Imagery

[blair1q]

That's a piss-poor artist's rendition that on the one hand has a silly sun being slurped up like spaghetti by a black hole, and on the other hand has a depiction of the sort of jet that actually occurs at the poles of a spinning black hole.

The actual "bubble" is diffusion of the jet into gas somewhere off in the direction of the black hole, and is not depicted in that image.

Re:Imagery

[Tablizer]

Why is the bubble of gas so spherical?

According to my FoxNews Guide to the Universe, the natives considered cubic ones to be eyesores, lowering local real-estate values.

Excuse me!

[Locke2005]

Anybody got a white dwarf sized Beano?

Re:Excuse me!

[mcneely.mike]

The Time Bandits stole it.

Previous Record Holder

[xmuskrat]

The previous record holder for a gas bubble discharge was the Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent. This was done over a seven hour period while reciting his award-winning poem, "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning."

Cause and effect

[whizbang77045]

Obviously, this must be in some way the result of global warming. Everything else is....

We can fix it...

[LynnwoodRooster]

Just send off a rocket full of this.

Adjacent to the accretion disk...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is NGC 911 also known as the Taco Bell Nebula.

End of the world.

[Monkeedude1212]

Let's do this grade 6 math puzzle style.

Expanding at ~1,000,000 km/h

12 million light years away.

It already has a radius of 1000 light years.

Assume a light year is 9.46 trillion km long.

Assuming this gas bubble was created by the universes first perpetual motion machine, so the growth is constant, how long before this gas bubble wipes out all life on Earth. Someone watch my math and make sure I didn't slip up.

(9,460,000,000 * 12) - 5000 = 113519995000 km to go.

113519995000 * 1000 = 113519995000000 hours left.

Or 4729999791666.6 repeating days
Or ~675714255952 weeks
or ~12994504922 years.

If we do live forever, mark your calendars, 12994506932, Earth is finished.

Re:End of the world.

[GrumblyStuff]

Hmm. Only 7 billion years after our sun turns into a red giant.

Ideally, we'll have moved off this rock and/or moved the rock itself by then.

Re:End of the world.

[Monkeedude1212]

But by that time an entire bubble with a radius of 12 million 1 thousand light years will have engulfed part of our space.

Re:End of the world.

[PPH]

But it will diminish in density. By the time it reaches us it will be nothing more than a malodorous puff of wind.

Re:End of the world.

[blair1q]

Okay. Now do this one:

As population grows, eventually there will be enough people to entirely cover the surface of the earth one person deep. As population grows further, the depth of humans will increase, pushing the surface of the human-earth outward. Given the current population growth rate, how long, in years, will it be until the human-earth surface is expanding outward at the speed of light?

Hint: it's a 4-digit number.

Re:End of the world.

[Jake Griffin]

Let's do this grade 6 math puzzle style.

Expanding at ~1,000,000 km/h

12 million light years away.

It already has a radius of 1000 light years.

Assume a light year is 9.46 trillion km long.

Assuming this gas bubble was created by the universes first perpetual motion machine, so the growth is constant, how long before this gas bubble wipes out all life on Earth. Someone watch my math and make sure I didn't slip up.

9,460,000,000,000 km/ly * (12,000,000 ly - 1000 ly) = 113,510,540,000,000,000,000 km to go.

113,510,540,000,000,000,000 km / 1,000,000 km/hr = 113,510,540,000,000 hrs left.

Or ~4,729,605,833,333 days

Or ~675,657,976,190 weeks

Or ~12,993,422,619 years.

If we do live forever, mark your calendars, 12,993,424,639, Earth is finished.

FTFY.

Somehow, despite the fact that you...

- substituting 9.46 billion for 9.46 trillion

- multiplying by 12 then subtracting 5000 instead of multiplying by 12 million minus 1 thousand

- multiplying by 1,000 instead of dividing by 1,000,000

... you still managed to get an answer that was a small error off. Will you PLEASE explain the steps you took? I can't make any sense of them, but obviously there is some legitimacy to them.

Oh, and if it's growing at 1,000,000 km/hr in DIAMETER, it will take twice as long...

Re:End of the world.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately we will not see it because EoW is scheduled for this Thursday at 2:47pm. Kiss your ./ goodbye.

Re:End of the world.

[GrumblyStuff]

Ah, but we know where it is. We just go the other way. We'll have to move off in 4-5 billion years and will have a 7 billion year head start.

Re:End of the world.

[BikeHelmet]

Isn't our sun going to be dead long before then?

Re:End of the world.

[linzeal]

What is this black hole powered by, bean burritos?

Re:End of the world.

[BitZtream]

Only if we happen to be in the path of the jet, its not a sphere you know. I'm not upping my life insurance policy.

Re:End of the world.

[Jane Q. Public]

Still incorrect, if only be a small percentage, because this doesn't take into account the 12 million years it has already been traveling.

Re:End of the world.

[chebucto]

Won't the rate of increase in the radius of the sphere decrease as a cube function of time? Or something like that? :)

Re:End of the world.

[El_Oscuro]

Head explodes!!!!!!

Re:End of the world.

[Anonymous Coward]

The human-earth won't expand unless we add additional outside (i.e., moon, asteroid belt) materials.

Re:End of the world.

[mysidia]

Expanding at ~1,000,000 km/h

I think 12994504922 would be a vast underestimate. Right now it's expanding at ~1,000,000 km/h. It is unlikely that the rate of expansion is constant.

It is likely to run into other matter in the universe, and changes in temperature that can reduce the rate of expansion, long before it reaches earth.

Also, the universe itself is expanding at approximately 255,000 km/h, and an accelerating rate.

It is possible that long before it reaches earth, the rate of expansion of the universe will be so high, that it can never reach earth.

Re:End of the world.

[Paxinum]

I couldn't follow your calculations, but your answer is ok; http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(12*10^6+light+years%29+%2F+%281000000+km%2Fh+*+%2824*365+hours%2Fyear%29%29 Using units in the calculations makes it easier.

Re:End of the world.

[Anonymous Coward]

Still, even with that calculation, what blows my mind is that the universe is big enough for something to grow at that INSANELY fast rate for 200k years, and it's still nowhere near us. Holy CRAP the universe is HUGE!

Re:End of the world.

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet that in 12994504920 years, the Erthians would be said to have predicted the end of the universe. Look, it says so on this ancient computer thing called Internet archive! How can you argue with that?

Re:End of the world.

[owlstead]

OK, now somebody calculate how many atoms are actually going to hit earth once it's here (if it gets here at all), or I won't be able to sleep tonight.

Re:End of the world.

[Anonymous Coward]

Where does the mas for the new humans come from?
It has to come from the planet, so why would humans push the surface outward?
Wouldn't it be more reasonable to assume that humans dig into the planet, turning its mass into humans in the process, and ask:
How long until humans reach the core?
How long until the entire mass of Earth is turned into humans?

Re:End of the world.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you want to really get technical, 1000 light years is only one significant digit (1000. Would be 4..) so none of my calculations would be accurate.. I was just surprised that his obviously flawed calculation resulted in a somewhat accurate result. (posted on my phone, too lazy to log in)

Re:End of the world.

[Jane Q. Public]

Well, if you want to really get technical, 1000 light years is only one significant digit (1000. Would be 4..) so none of my calculations would be accurate.

Very true. As I mentioned, it was a small percentage. But it still seemed to be a rather glaring omission.

. I was just surprised that his obviously flawed calculation resulted in a somewhat accurate result. (posted on my phone, too lazy to log in)

Me too. But this same subject has come up in ClimateGate: How could apparently bad science come up with a result that roughly matches those of others who used other methods and data?

And (in the case of ClimateGate), part of the answer is rather disconcerting: as it turns out the data were massaged in a similar manner.

Re:End of the world.

[Anonymous Coward]

So we're magically adding mass now?

Re:End of the world.

[blair1q]

When we put a building a thousand feet into the sky, are we adding mass?

pictures are here

[at10u8]

Radio and x-ray images in their astro-ph preprint.

Re:pictures are here

[LittleRedStar]

Thanks!! Original article incorrectly uses an artists illustration of another situation and the Nature link wants fee to view.

Go ahead

[PPH]

Pull my event horizon.

Re:Go ahead

[westcoast philly]

I hardly know you!
.. besides, I just ate, and I wouldn't want to cramp up and drown.

Mini-"Big Bang" in action

[cyberspittle]

Mini-"Big Bang" in action

drumroll...

[Anonymous Coward]

It was Elvis!

Galactic Petroleum

[Tablizer]

GP really screwed up this time. They put their energy well too far into the black hole's accretion disk, and it triggered a run-away tidal friction cascade, spewing hot plasma toward Jar Jar Bink's planet.

I'm sure it's just an accident. After all, who'd want to kill Jar Jar?

BP is 200,000 years old?

[Krystlih]

So BP has been in space all this time?

WTF happened to my /.?

[Huntr]

A whole hour and not 1 goatse reference?

This is a day that shall live in infamy.

200,000 years

[Lord Lode]

Is that 200,000 years from now, or 200,000 years from 12 million years ago? (since it's that many lightyears away)

Don't know about your mama...

[Anonymous Coward]

...but that's a very big fart!

Re:Don't know about your mama...

[russellwilliams]

That's a spicy meataball!

Send the GSV Beano to investigate

[SteeldrivingJon]

lol

Puppeteers Need to Change Course

[Game_Ender]

Quick! Someone tell the puppeteers, before they run into *another* exploding galaxy.

Obligatory Futurama

[frieko]

"Think of the astronomical odors you'll smell thanks to me!"

Re:Obligatory Futurama

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm so glad Futurama can explore this with their smelloscope. It is a sign.

So

[Dunbal]

I guess BP was drilling there, too.

Big bang what if...

[Anonymous Coward]

What if this is really how the "big bang" started and really the universe was the result of multiple events similar to this? What if we are witnessing the rebirth of the universe, an alternate universe or an expansion?

There are so many things that we still have to discover and witness - it still amazes me how much we know and how little we do at the same time.

Just some thoughts.

Re:Big bang what if...

[owlstead]

Great insight! I'm off proving that galaxies can actually travel back in time...

WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the presented picture, the so called gas cloud seems to be more like a concrete body which is slowly but surely sucked into by the quasar, and not the other way around.

Interstellar light saber ?

[Anonymous Coward]

So its an interstellar light saber ? Lucas's lawyers seen rushing to the area to issue the blackhole a C&D..

Just a minute

[nu1x]

I need to boot up my not well-known of subspace red-phone to The Hindmost.

It's seldom used ...

In science

[toolow2]

"In science, a theory is a hypothesis" that has not been proven wrong. That does not prove it right. You just believe it is right. We do not have a clue what a black hole really is. The only thing we know is what it looks like in different colors. We do not know for a fact.

Re:In science

[arisvega]

The only thing we know is what it looks like in different colors.

Uuh .. black?

Re:In science

[DragonWriter]

"In science, a theory is a hypothesis" that has not been proven wrong. That does not prove it right.

Nothing outside of pure logic is ever "proven right". Science is a process of observation, providing hypotheses with explain the observations and predict future observations in a manner which makes them falsifiable, attempting to falsify the hypotheses, and replacing or refining them when they conflict with observations.

We do not have a clue what a black hole really is.

We certainly have a very many clues, which are the vast array of observations that underlie the current theoretical model, both those that black hole theory was created to explain and those that have occurred since in the testing of the theory, the refinement of some parts of it, and the validation of others.

We do not know for a fact.

This is true of the nature of black holes in the exact same sense that it is true of the theories in the fields of materials science and fluid mechanics that are used in building planes. We have masses of observations, we have a model which we can and have used successfully to predict results that weren't used in coming up with the model, but we have no way -- as with everything in the physical universe -- of directly "knowing" the underlying truth, only making observations and hypothesizing relations between them and testing those hypotheses.

some dialed a super gate!

[Joe The Dragon]

some dialed a super gate!

Minor nit...

[matunos]

12 million light years from here, I suspect you would not find a gas bubble shooting out of a black hole, because if we're detecting it now, it means it happened 12 million years ago, and if you were 12 million years away from here at that black hole, the gas bubble would have long since been shot out.

Gas bubble

[ciaran.mchale]

Black Hole Emits a 1,000-Light-Year-Wide Gas Bubble

That must have far worse consequences for global warming than the methane emitted by all the cows in the world.

From the article..

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read the comments in the original article, somebody mentioned that it's a gas ball (sun) being sucked into the black hole, and not a gas ball being produced by the black hole. Does somebody have any idea as to how credible (read: n00b) the persons who discovered this are?

It would be interesting to see an accurate animation of the phenomena to prove or disprove this.

LOL Like Black Holes Exist

[chrispan]

Really, can we get some real scientists in this decade??? Why the heck do people spit out junk science that was written decades ago?? Black Holes are a mathematical figment. They don’t exist period. There was no need to invent them if the electrical nature of matter and the universe had been considered. The ‘black hole’ concept is a classic example of the malaise afflicting modern physics. It is a scam, joke and crappy science. Go order a fraking plasma gun and boooyah!! you'll smack the science in this article back to the stone age....

Black hole

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I was on the bus next to that fat bitch this morning.