Slashdot Mirror
Star Falls Into Black Hole
thodelu writes with news that astronomers recently got a look at what they believe is a star falling into a black hole. Phil Plait explains:
"As the star approached this bottomless pit, the side of the star facing the black hole was pulled far harder than the other side of the star, which may have been a million or more kilometers farther away from the black hole. This change in pull stretched the star — this stretching is called a 'tide,' and is essentially the same thing that causes tides on the Earth from the Moon’s gravity and when the star wandered too close to the black hole, the strength of that pull became irresistible, overcoming the star’s own internal gravity. In a flash, the star was torn apart, and octillions of tons of ionized gas burst outward! This material whipped around the black hole, forming a disk of plasma called an accretion disk. Magnetic fields, friction, and turbulence superheated the plasma, and also focused twin beams of matter and energy which blasted out from the poles of the disk, away from the black hole itself. The energy stored in these beams is incredible, crushing our imagination into dust: for a time, they shone with the light of a trillion Suns!"
Why is Slashdot covering Charlie Sheen now?
To read more about Pia being dumped from American Idol
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Unleash the kerosene powered tubes and *colonize* that sumbitch! Wrap a few trillion kilometers of copper wire around that thing and beam the power back to Earth, we need the energy!
Fitting though, for the death of a star.
Get his man a turtleneck, joint, and a public television slot!
I would be quite surprised if one was able to witness the entire event through a telescope from start to finish. I'm curious how long it takes a star to "fall into a black hole" from start to finish.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
"The energy stored in these beams is incredible, crushing our imagination into dust: for a time, they shone with the light of a trillion Suns!"
So, we should put on sunglasses when looking at it?
Inexplicably, no witty comment comes to mind.
Imagination is more important than knowledge -Einstien
Is a distortion of both Time and Space.
While a star being stretched and pulled into a Black Hole, and perhaps giving out a death cry (rather poetically written as: "The energy stored in these beams is incredible, crushing our imagination into dust: for a time, they shone with the light of a trillion Suns!") is certainly fascinating stuff. It seems to me that within its own reality the Sun remains unstreched, unbent and happy as can be until it merges with that which is the black hole (which itself is converting matter to energy, emitted from its poles.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
DERP DERP look at my WITTY and RELEVANT comment
> ...twin beams of matter and energy which blasted out from the poles of the disk...
Shouldn't you get one beam going straight into the black hole and one going straight out? A disc doesn't really have "poles", just an axis. The only way I can see the summary being literally true is if (somehow) a fair portion of the star ended up on the side of the black hole opposite the collision.
Why, if only a naked singularity could be tamed and harnessed to power a alcebere gravity distortion field space warp drive! Why, with technologies such as this we could invade any star system in the galaxy...
The purpose of existence is to make money.
Has anybody figured out why this was a part of discover's bad astronomy blog?
That's OVER 9000 times the force of 1000 suns!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Is this a rhetorical phrase like ginormous, or is this number actually defined somewhere?
May the Maths Be with you!
You lose, Sentry! Trillion suns beats a million!
As I was thinking about black holes the other day, a few questions came to mind. I'm no astrophysicist, so pardon if they're silly.
The setup: If you pass the event horizon, you're going in, obviously. While you won't take forever to hit the singularity once you're past the event horizon, it APPEARS as such.
1. If I took a cube 100 meters on a side, carved information on it that could be read from a distance, and slung it past the EH, how long would it remain visible? Forever? For the life of the singularity?
2. If for a long period of time, could this be used as a method of "permanent" information storage? I've read too much sci-fi, as I keep picturing an intergalactic bulletin board... just waiting to be read...
4. If the block DOES remain visible, and the singularity eventually has enough dropped blocks into it, would it render the black hole "visible"?
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Subject is self explanitory but woudn't this event be very comparable to a supernova or would it be more incredible because supernovas happen at the end of a star's lifecycle?
-AC
the ori are dialing a super gate
am I missing a 'boeing, boeing, gone' at the end of this?
First there were dupe stories and now we get news from billions of years ago, what is /. coming to?
I read the headline and thought I was coming here to read about how Charlie Sheen got drunk off his ass and fell in a manhole or something.
I just have one question for the black hole, what did it taste like? And is tabasco required or is it spicy enough on its own?
Monstar L
old news this happened 4 billion years ago!
then there's the unproven dead, still unproven. so that takes care of that. the fake weather? where are we boeing?
look it up in the genuine native american elders teepeeleaks etchings, in between murder, mayhem, hymen, & real sex religious 'training'/surgical alterations/extermination. lots to go through, but knowing the truth about our real history helps us decide which of the rulers' planes are 'better', or if we even need any? a continued accurate recorded history of us would be good?
spys like us?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDVt_hSo_EU&NR=1
How many brazillians is one octillion?
Any site that "embiggens" images when you click on them is OK with me.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Repent, human heathens, before we are all turned into tomato sauce!
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I pulled the lever on the machine, but the Clark bar didn't come out! ...
Get rid of the exclamation points...
.. who is sick of these things
It Godwins Law for physics/cosmology:
The probability that one will bring up black holes in a discussion about physics approaches 1.
I know Slashdot has a penchant for posting old stories, but a story that happened four Billion years ago? That's just ridiculous.
GENERATION 667: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation
Black hole = awesome. Black hole swallowing a sun = probably beyond the scope of our comprehension, but not quite so amazing that it can turn an intangible thing like imagination into a tangible thing like dust. The author of the summary may have had his brain turned to dust, but to make a claim like this indicates that the imagination is functioning quite well. Perhaps too well.
A lot of the star in the disc, a lot of the star in the jets, precisely how much of the star actually falls into the black hole?
In Soviet Russia, black hole falls into you!
Simple application of revolutionary relativistic dialectical physics, too advanced for capitalist bourgeoisie obsessed with reference frame status.
Man that really sucks!!! Stars that fall down and can't get back up.
You can censor it but one day you'll all have to come face-to-face with the truth!
These comments sucks.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those ...
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
"Catch a falling star, put it in your pocket..."
Falling into a gravity well pocket in space-time...
If you want to understand the tidal gradient around a very dense object, go read Larry Niven's Neutron Star.
/. is slipping.
And you shouldn't have had to scan down 123 postings to find this.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
*shades on*
sux.
yyeeeaaaahhhhhhhhhh!
OK, the one central tenet is the gravity is so great not even light can escape. If that is so, then how can "Hawking radiation" escape it? This seems to contradict the one law of black holes.
Now that's some bad-ass tronomy!
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
It occurs to me that the gravitational-wave astronomers will be looking for a signal from this event. If any gravitational waves produced by it happen to be heading in our direction, that is. From what I understand regarding how such waves would be produced, and how the href="http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/">LIGO system works, detection of a signal may be reasonably expect-able.
...will be called "A Star is Torn" ... and the climax will be when the "twin beams of matter and energy which blasted out from the poles of the disk" cross over each other, causing the black hole to explode "into torrents of melted marshmallow".
I am anarch of all I survey.
But from everything I read, Hawking radiation comes from within the EH, from the actual singularity. That's is in complete opposite of the "nothing can escape the gravity of a black hole" law.
The images shows only a star that for some reason explodes and disappears in a giant gamma ray burst. This is not a proof about the existence of black holes. I still have to see a convincing experimental proof that they do actually exist.
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Or Tony Perkins? Yvette Mimieux? OK, that's pushing it, but Ernest Borgnine??
This is perhaps a crazy theory but could this, and perhaps other, powerful astronomical events be the trigger of major earthquakes? If the X-rays got to us recently, could the gravitational waves have reached us say a couple of weeks earlier?
Just like a nuke bomb but maybe a trillion trillion times more powerful, I wonder if ripping a star apart like that is something that gives enough energy to do something incredible with, such as in this case close a black hole...or in some other cases cause rifts in space ...of course this is just theory as no one can know for sure, but when something like this happens, and is recorded, I hope we have the intellect to think that the aftermath is also just as important, to see what else gets affected, from the cause and effect factor....although I still wonder if the black hole is at all affected, or just keeps sucking...
If imagination is intangible, like say, energy, then it can be converted into something tangible, like matter (dust).
There is in fact a well known formula for this conversion, but as is also well known, the amounts of energy required are vast.
The Author of the article is pointing out that there is sufficient amount of energy stored in these beams to in fact turn your imagination into dust.
LMAO - & he fails as usual. See subject-line and of course, mevets usual patent stupidity.