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NASA Announces Discovery of 30-Year-Old Black Hole
broknstrngz tips news of an announcement today from NASA about the discovery of a black hole in the M100 galaxy, roughly 50 million light-years from Earth. The discovery is notable because, if confirmed, it's now the youngest known black hole, born from the remains of a supernova we observed in 1979. Bad Astronomer Phil Plait explains why scientists think it collapsed to a black hole, rather than a neutron star: "The way a neutron star emits X-rays is different than that of a black hole. As a neutron star cools, the X-ray emission will fade. However, a black hole blasts out X-rays as material falls in; that stuff forms a flat disk, called an accretion disk, around the black hole. As this matter falls onto the newly created black hole, it gets heated to unimaginable temperatures — millions of degrees — and blasts out X-rays. In that case, the X-rays emitted would be steady over time. What astronomers have found is that the X-rays from SN1979c have been steady in brightness over observations from 1995 – 2007. This is very strong evidence that the star’s core did indeed collapse into a black hole." He also warns that we're not certain quite yet, and we'll have to keep our eye on it to make sure it's not a pulsar.
To all the inevitable pedantic responses about it not "really" happening 30 years old, I'll be even more pedantic. :) Relativity of Simultaneity, look it up. It's absolutely meaningless to talk of the temporal ordering of space-like separated events. In some suitable reference frame, it "really" did happen 30 years ago.
Of course. Unless you have some magical way of getting those images to us or us to the black hole faster than the speed of light, for all intents and purposes it is 30 years old, as viewed from our frame of reference.
It's not that hard to figure out. We're looking at what a 30-year old black hole looks like, regardless of how long it took that light to get here.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
"No, it's 50,000,030 years old no matter where you are."
Uhm. I'm moving at 0.8c. It looks very much like 25000015 years old to me.
Are you suggesting that there's a global frame of reference?
Why does *our frame* matter so?
Because it's the one we're observing it from. In a Relativistic universe, everything is relative to a frame of reference and you can't actually say anything about when things happen or their age outside of the context of a specific frame of reference.
The enemies of Democracy are
As this matter falls onto the newly created black hole, it gets heated to unimaginable temperatures — millions of degrees— and blasts out X-rays
Translation: The temperature is so high, it is somehow unimaginable using numbers. But since you are reading on, let me just pull a totally random number out of my ass and say a million degrees... wait no.. make it a millions, as in more than 1 million, which makes my claim sound sorta vague and not precise but makes it nevertheless appear I know what I'm talking about. That should cover the unimaginable bit of it. Besides, its not like you're going to check anyways so fuck it, lets and some em dashes for extra emphasis for no other reason other than because its really "HOT". I mean wow, can you imagine a place this hot? I'm just siting here in my office, thinking to myself, geeze this black hole stuff is not the usual environment I'm used to, most likely because I would have been obliterated and spit out as really "HOT" x-rays... there, you see where I'm coming from? HOT!
~ In Trust, We Trust ~
Actually, there exists a well defined frame of reference with respect to velocity. In rotation this is pretty obvious, since rotation with respect to the absolute frame causes centrifugal forces to appear.
Constant linear movement is not so easy to measure, but there's the background radiation dipole that can be measured and defines an absolute velocity with respect to the universe.
We cannot define one point as an absolute origin, but we can define one state as being "standing still" with respect to the absolute origin, both in rotation and in translation.