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?
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
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
Do not look into incredible beam shining with the light of a trillion suns with remaining eye.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. ~ Douglas Adams
The writer is probably thinking of the axial jets. Those are emitted from the hole itself, which is at the center of the disc, so it's technically true.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
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!
the ori are dialing a super gate
Fitting though, for the death of a star.
Get his man a turtleneck, joint, and a public television slot!
It's all relative, man. The star doesn't die, it ceases to be its own entity and combines with the mass of the Black Hole.
billyuns and billyuns
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
First there were dupe stories and now we get news from billions of years ago, what is /. coming to?
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!
It was probably a publicity stunt for another civilisation's equivalent of Coca-Cola and involved the band Disaster Area.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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
First comment about Charlie Sheen posted by AC @09:14PM (First Post!!!1)
Second comment about Charlie Sheen posted by Tablizer @09:15PM
Your Charlie Sheen comment posted @10:05PM
Ever think you're putting a little too much care and attention into your posts?
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
How many brazillians is one octillion?
DERP DERP look at my WITTY and RELEVANT comment
Can't work out whether this was meant as a criticism of the predictable repetitive attempts at being funny vs. actual insightful comments, or just another stupid pointless comment.
But at any rate I'll assume the former, and say that the responses to this story demonstrate again that *in general*, Slashdotters' expertise and ability to comment insightfully on science subjects drops way more sharply than you'd expect when the subject matter veers even slightly beyond the usual IT/gaming/electronic tech subject matter.
What's disappointing isn't so much the lack of people with knowledge about the field, because we can't all be experts. It's that people seem more content to make lame rehashes of the predictable "Hollywood" star confusion-type jokes instead of at least asking questions that demonstrate an interest in the subject (and provide a jumping off point for those who *do* know about this kind of thing to address those of us with less expertise, often answering questions we hadn't thought to ask ourselves, but want to hear the answers to).
I must admit though, to being surprised that, at the time of writing, there is only one smartass this time pointing out that this event actually happened years ago due to the distance light has to travel. It's not an astronomy thread without at least ten people showing how "clever" they are by pointing this out like we haven't heard it before and getting pedantic over the implications, like we haven't had *that* discussion before either....
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!
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?
Man that really sucks!!! Stars that fall down and can't get back up.
Well, one of the reviews of his latest book does say "Reading this book is like getting punched in the face by Carl Sagan." (quoted on the sidebar of TFA). You're not the first to compare Plait to Sagan.
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."
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.
Ever think *some* Slashdotters don't spend all day refreshing and trying to get 'first post' ?
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
It's possible I miss the point because the solution seems pretty simple to me. The really hot stuff just outside the event horizon radiates this energy.
Take off every 'sig' !!
Nick Waterman, Sr Tech Director, #include <stddisclaimer>
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.
Then check out this video of stars orbiting a black hole.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
So was this one of those events that could have sent out a lethal burst of neutron radiation, killing life in distant systems?
Maybe we should be mourning the loss of life on planets we've never known?
Ever think *some* Slashdotters don't spend all day refreshing and trying to get 'first post' ?
Yes, but in that case I'd hope that they might actually read some comments to see if what they're going to post has already been said*. Seeing as this guy repeated the contents of the first and second responses to the article I chose to give the benefit of the doubt and assume GGP was merely very very thorough rather than inept.
*: Yes, yes, I must be new here.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
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.