Slashdot Mirror
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
From our point in space, it is 30 years old.
But, more to the point, what we're observing now is a 30-year-old black hole. It's just that over where the black hole is, it's no longer 30 years old. That's not particularly relevant to us on Earth.