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Astronomers See Another Star Torn Apart By a Black Hole
The Bad Astronomer writes "A star in a galaxy 2.7 billion light years away wandered too close to a supermassive black hole and suffered the ultimate fate: it was literally torn apart by the black hole's gravity. The event was seen as a flash of ultraviolet light flaring 350 times brighter than the galaxy itself, slowly fading over time. Astronomers were able to determine that some of the star's material was eaten by the black hole, and some flung off into space. Although rare, this is the second time such a thing has been seen; the other was just last year."
I prefer "hole-of-color".
You are welcome on my lawn.
George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey in an octagon match
Yeah, finally, after 14 billion years of existence, the universe went from this event never happening to happening all the time in under a year. And now the earth's existence will end because, you know, since this happens all the time now and since we're right next to the black hole in the center of our galaxy, a star being torn apart is sufficiently close to destroy all life.
I find your ideas insightful and I would like to sign up for your newsletter.
In this article the scale of the gravity comes into focus:
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/05/giant-black-hole-shreds-and-swal.html?ref=hp
"Before its fiery demise, when the star was about as far from its nemesis as Pluto is from the sun, the black hole stripped off its hydrogen envelope."
At 3.5 billion miles the black hole is able to out-gravity a star of its own hydrogen atmosphere. Am I reading that right?
How is this different from a quasar?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasar
If we 3D print enough scrith we can build a Ringworld.
We'll never get to witness that, either Sol will become a red giant first, consuming anything that still lives on the earth, or, the gravity of the black hole with eat the earth before Sol succumbs. Either way, we'll already be dead.
Unless, of course, you have reservations at Milliway's
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
We know that black holes can suck in matter - the gamma ray radiation emitted when matters are flatten to a disc before it's being sucked in are indication of black hole devouring matter.
But how about dark matter, or anti-matter?
Will black hole's gravity pull pulls in dark matter and/or anti-matter?
What effect would that have?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Dark matter responds to gravity, and antimatter should as well. So they'd get pulled in and never seen again.
There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!
Wait does the hoodie play a part here or not? Is this just a lame attempt at current-events-race-related humor?
The odds of such an event are... [sunglasses]....Astronomical.
May the Maths Be with you!
Do you know how much ABS filament costs? Are you insane?
How can galactic central maintain an orderly galaxy, if astronomers are going to be apathetic?
Might just as well be alien armada making it's way though galaxy destroying every planet for fuel. Let's not poke around there too much.
Does anyone ever wonder if antimatter is our representation of what exists as matter on the other side of any given (or perhaps all) black hole(s) inside another dimension/universe/whatever you wanna call it? Universe pairs? Hawking theorized that black holes have white hole pairs - maybe his math just indicated that there is no Lord Nibbler poo at the completion of a black hole (or the start of our universe) but rather another instance of er...space ie- how does a singularity occur w/ infinite mass (or so we would calculate) with the law of conservation of mass - lots of cosmologists must be trying to prove it goes somewhere so why not another dimension/universe/etc - and to consider attractive forces like that perhaps draw a theoretical parallel with polarity so that since our typical everyday matter is attracted to a black hole, perhaps that dimension/etc's typical everyday matter is as well (their own BH, WH to us) and perhaps the other side of any black hole is what would be our theoretical white hole counterpart to a black hole, our antimatter counterpart to our matter, etc etc?
will work for dragon quest localization
Don't be ridiculous.
I'm not nearly lucky enough for such a thing to happen!
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
If you squint closely enough at a couple of graphs and turn them sideways, an anti-electron (positron) is just a regular electron going back in time. Close enough?
Dark matter is just stuff they cant see, anti-matter is differnt, assuming it would make it to the event horizon without coming in contact with matter, and going poof into pure energy, it would still go in. I suppose it would come into contact with regular matter at the point and go poof but it doesnt matter at that point since even the energy emitted wouldnt be able to escape and the black hole wouldnt lose any mass because keeping with E=MC^2 the sum of the energy would still have the same mass as the matter itself.
I apologize if it's a dumb question, but isn't the whole point of a black hole that not even light escapes?
This scenario was observed twice in two years. Not exactly rare when you realize how little of the sky we watch.
Yeeeeeaaaaahhhhhh!
Will black hole's gravity pull pulls in dark matter and/or anti-matter?
Gravity effects everything, it's the most powerful fundamental force of all.
"The Elegant Universe" book, CD and Series by Nova
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/elegant-universe-dimensions.html freaking ads I can't get past them.
Uses a pool table as an example, the only thing that escapes a pool table is sound.
Sound being gravity, which exerts it's force in all dimensions.
Gravity rated 4th in strengths of the fundamental forces, yet the force it exerts in all dimensions added together,
gravity sucks big time.
We'll never get to witness that, either Sol will become a red giant first, consuming anything that still lives on the earth, or, the gravity of the black hole with eat the earth before Sol succumbs. Either way, we'll already be dead.
Unless, of course, you have reservations at Milliway's
Considering this year's Earth Day slogan,
There may yet be another option...
ie- how does a singularity occur w/ infinite mass (or so we would calculate) with the law of conservation of mass
"How the Universe Works: Black Holes", The Discovery channel, Netflix (and others I'm sure) is an excellent reference for your answers.
The entire series is very informative.
Astronomers See Another Star Torn Apart By a Black Hole
What a coincidence... last night I watched Another Black Hole Torn Apart by a Massive Star. (Number 19, I think...)
As usual, the ending was no surprise. Some stellar material was ejected, and then Fin.
I can see the fnords!
Dark matter responds to gravity, and antimatter should as well. So they'd get pulled in and never seen again.
Which really isn't saying much, since they were never seen before, either.
Why is Obama crippling our black hole defenses?
I am not a physicist
:p
The mass doesn't just go "somewhere". Blackholes slowly dissipate over time as they give off energy in the form of gravity. Eventually a blackhole will just disapear. poof
Mass and energy are interchangeable. You have to stop thinking of a blackhole as matter and think of it as a big ball of energy.
Blackholes don't have infinite mass, they have infinite density.
That being said, what Trax3001BBS posted is really good. Netflix "Universe". There is A LOT. Keep using your imagination
I think the Q continuum is at war again.
"This food is problematic."
These guys are wrong so often that an event occurring 2.7 billion light years away is probably inaccurate.
"I guess I'm gonna fade into Bolivian."
Uh, antimatter is seen all the time. Heck, the "P" in "PET scan" stands for "positron", the electron's antiparticle. As for dark matter, it's "seen" in gravitational effects, which is admittedly indirect and somewhat inconclusive. Still, humans are rather biased. The matter you're made out of is mostly quarks and electrons. Quarks are affected by all four fundamental forces: (G)ravity, (E)lectromagnetism, (W)eak, and (S)trong. Electrons are only affected by GEW. Neutrinos have just GW and are therefore hard to detect. Maybe there's matter that's just affected by G; it would only show up on cosmological scales like dark matter seems to.
Quoting myself,
Who knows? Maybe there's a whole segment of matter humans are unfamiliar with which interacts very little with the matter we know about but interacts with itself in complicated ways. Maybe there are dark matter solar systems populated by dark matter people who are just as confused as we are about the weird gravitational anomalies caused by our otherwise invisible existence. Communicating through gravity would certainly be an interesting challenge! I don't really believe this, but my point is basically the same as Hamlet's: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy"--that is, it's arrogant to expect humans to be in a position to observe all the parts of the universe. Perhaps some things are just hidden.
Another recent post of mine in this vein is a summary of particle classifications.
Reddit covered this 2.7 billion years ago. Slashdot is always late to the party but it was never this bad when Taco was in charge.
Here are some relevant bits of physics you might not be aware of:
* White holes are somewhat shaky. From their Wikipedia article,
However, this region does not exist for black holes that have formed through gravitational collapse, nor are there any known physical processes through which a white hole could be formed.
There are apparently solutions to the Einstein field equations giving black/white hole pairs, but black holes do not need white holes to exist.
* There is an interpretation of antimatter in quantum field theory as matter traveling backwards through time (that phrase is very imprecise unfortunately). More details here; I'm not qualified to really discuss it as I'm just a mathematician with an interest in physics. Still, perhaps in vague terms your parallel universe dichotomy can be replaced with the two directions of time.
* Black holes have infinite density, not infinite mass.
* Hawking radiation allows black holes to evaporate away if they don't eat up enough mass.
I'll grant you the antimatter issue, but I still like my tongue-in-cheek jab at the GGP for saying that dark matter wouldn't be "seen" after falling into a black hole. It is "dark" after all, meaning it cannot be seen in the human sense of the word, so the difference between it being in a black hole and not being in a black hole is visibly none.
Of course, the really interesting thing is that it's possible that the actual act of falling into a black hole is the only thing that would ever make dark matter visible. So it would never be seen before, or after, but possibly could be seen *during* its descent into the singularity.
Black holes tear things apart. This is just like wolves. People often find it surprising, that something as simple -as a pack of wolves- can tear a family apart. (Thanks again S.N.L.)
Black holes don't have infinite mass. Just many stars' worth of mass, squeezed into a very tiny area. Relativity tells us that the *density* is infinite, but quantum mechanics shows that even the singularity must have some volume. The mass doesn't go anywhere - in fact, things that fall into the black hole never actually make it to the center due to time dilation effects.
And, antimatter is just like normal matter, it just carries an opposite charge because it's made from different versions of subatomic particles. It's not that exotic - we make antimatter all the time - go to a hospital and get a PET scan. "Dark matter", on the other hand... we have no idea what that is.
I can't believe your mom wandered as far as 2.7 billion light years away to eat an entire star...
She's even bigger than I imagined.
I just finished Leonard Susskind's "The Black Hole War" - also very readable and informative.
No Inflation Taxation without Representation
I apologize if it's a dumb question, but isn't the whole point of a black hole that not even light escapes?
The gravity tore apart the star before it entered the black hole. Watching all the videos about black holes and space might lead one to think that orbits are easy to achieve, but after I ran some particle simulations using simple Newtonian physics in my game engine, I noticed that most particles will slingshot around a source of heavier gravity when they approach, and be flung too far away for gravity to recapture it. In a stellar nursery this sling shot effect places a limit on the star's size, the other main contributing factor being initial density of the nebula. This is true for black holes as well as planets or asteroids approaching a star. So, although some of the star will fall into the black hole, a lot more of it gets flung away from the black hole -- It's a classic case of Conservation of angular momentum...
They're seeing what happens when something gets close to a black hole, not goes into it. You can see things "going into a black hole" before they've reached the event horizon. Also: In my sim, elliptical orbits that didn't result in the object being flung away became tighter and rounder orbits over time.
That schools don't have kids play with simple sims like these in class is Ridiculous! My high-school age little brother hasn't played a traditional game in three weeks. Since I gave him the gravity sim (particle engine stress test) to play with -- all he does is simulate solar systems and formation of stars, or big stars eating little stars, etc. It's the first time I've ever seen him interested in space beyond the Halo Universe! He asked me about Quantum Physics yesterday!
Correction: Gravity affects everything, its the weakest fundamental force of all .
Glad I could help.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Maybe there are dark matter solar systems populated by dark matter people...
So far, the only force that we know dark matter responds to is gravity. If it's only influenced by gravity, then it's hard to see how it would build up the nice, complex chemistry that the electromagnetic force produces, which allows our form of life to exist.
Of course, it's possible that there are other forces that affect dark matter (and don't affect regular matter). There are ways we could detect this: for example, if two clumps of dark matter hit each other, then they should pass right through each other (if they only interact through gravity) or stop and clump together like regular matter (if there's another force by which they interact). Last I heard, though, no astronomers had seen any definite indications of this type of effect.
Can someone explain to me how astronomers can tell with any accuracy exactly what they're looking at in these photos? I mean I know that they look for gravitic lensing or other "tell tale signs" but it just seems that every article I see about some amazing thing happening in deep space that the scientists are looking at pictures of stars that have been censored by Japanese porn studios. Anyway if someone could shed some light on this for me I'd be very grateful
Well, we've created antimatter in the lab and it seems to behave very much like normal matter, it just has the opposite charge (for protons/electrons) and Baryon number (a QM property). So I suspect it would behave very much like normal matter, in fact I doubt we can actually tell whether a celestial object/event involves matter or antimatter, though it seems fairly likely that all the "native" matter in a particular galaxy will be the same type, otherwise it would have mutually annihilated whenever a gas cloud of one kind interacted with it's opposite, though a matter galaxy could conceivably capture a rogue star from a passing antimatter galaxy - as long as the rogue star never exploded or hit something directly it would likely be indistinguishable except for a *very* faint and diffuse halo where its antimatter-based solar wind contacted and annihilated the interstellar medium.
Dark matter though... that's an interesting question. As far as we can tell it only interacts gravitationally so it will never glow or collide with anything, since both are EM interactions. The Bullet Cluster would seem to indicate that it even passes right through other dark matter. Which raises an interesting question, while it could presumably be sucked into a black hole's event horizon it might continue to behave just as bizarrely, possibly even being able to escape again somehow. We just have no idea what the stuff is, it's even possible that it's not matter at all, but rather a phenomena symptomatic of a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of reality, much as black-box radiation in the 1800s led to the development of quantum mechanics and radically altered our understanding of the universe. It was widely believed at the time that we basically understood everything about physics, with just a few loose ends still to tie up (BB radiation, the cause of spectral lines, and a couple others). Instead those loose ends led to the unraveling of virtually everything we thought we knew and opened the door to something far stranger.
There's also the possibility that black holes don't exist at all and the question is nonsensical. We have evidence of ultra-massive non-luminous objects, but little if any for the existence of the defining characteristic of black holes, an event horizon. We assume they are black holes because our theories say that anything that massive would collapse into a singularity, but think about it - we're postulating that a body can become so dense that it creates a region of space where the laws of physics themselves to break down! There are several competing theories that make such a situation impossible, one that I like is based on the fact that Einstein treated gravity as a special case - all other energy fields generate a gravitational field based on their energy density. Einstein felt that it would be "double dipping" to have gravitational fields do so and discarded the idea. However, if we rework the equations assuming that they do in fact do so then we find that as the gravitational field strength becomes extreme the "secondary" gravity generated by the extreme energy density of the "primary" field pulls back against the primary source, causing the field strength to plateau at a level less than that required to create an event horizon, regardless of the density of the central object. If that, or some other mechanism, puts an upper limit on gravitational field strength it seems likely that the ultramassive objects are simply some sort of exotic quark-degenerate matter that happens to be non-luminous. As far as I can remember photons are radiated when (1) charges accelerate through space (as with radio transmissions), (2) electrons descend to a lower orital, and (3) nuclear processes result in lower binding energies. I don't know much QM, but it seems likely that (4) quark bindings and transmutaions that result in "left-over" energy would be a final source, and the only one that might apply to a neutron star, which are apparently directly observable (I couldn't find much in the way of de
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
GP said "most powerful" which is not synonymous with strongest. For example, conspiracy theories aside, the US president is probably one of the single most powerful men on the planet, but it's a matter of force multiplication, in a test of strength I'd bet on most any bodybuilder that challenged him.
In the case of gravity it's more a matter of force division. The nuclear forces fall off very rapidly with distance, becoming effectively nonexistent at even molecular scales. Magnetism fairs better, but still falls off with the inverse cube, becoming negligible at any significant distance. That leaves the electrostatic force as the only real challenger at long range, and it's bi-polarity causes opposite charges to tend to clump together in equal quantities, neutralizing it's effects.
And thus gravity is left standing as the long-range champion, free to shape the universe as it sees fit with little interference from it's myopic stronger cousins.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Better watch him careful or he might build a spaceship. :P
Carbon based humanoid in training.
^^ This was one of the most interesting posts I've ever read on Slashdot.
If you want to learn more about the phenomena this might be a good place to start. That's the distance at which a satellite will be torn apart into a ring by the gravitational shear of its primary. First gasses, then liquids (both fluids, but liquid's higher density and stronger inter-molecular attraction would let it get closer), and finally, even rigid bodies will get torn apart. I would guess a star could be roughly modeled as a liquid body with a gasseous atmosphere. The formulas don't really account for bodies with non-uniform density, but I'm betting the atmosphere would elongate far more readily than the denser than the much higher density core and cross the limit much in advance of the rest of the star.
An interesting feature is that the Roche Limit is independent of the mass of the satellite, it's only the mass of the primary and density of the satellite that matters. Conceivably you could have two identical stars tearing each other apart as they approach their Roche Limits, though they'd probably just end up merging into a single rapidly-spinning star instead of forming an awesome ring-shaped star. Still, with enough angular momentum you might at least get an extremely flattened ovoid, that'd be kinda cool.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
IANAP either, but as far as I know gravity isn't energy. Black holes evaporate due to Hawking radiation.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
IANAP, but I'd postulate that, assuming dark matter obeys the laws of time dilation, it would behave exatly as normal matter beyon the Schwartzschild radius of a black hole. Time would stop due to extreme time dilation and thus the particle would effectively stop at the Schwartzschild radius. Then the black hole would be a tiny bit more massive, the Schwartzschild radius would be a tiny bit bigger.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
I had to read, and re-read your comment 3 times before I begin to understand
Many thanks !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Frankly its astonishing to imagine that we just witnessed a even which occured 2.7 billion years ago ( which is the distance that took light to reach us )
I did mean to put that I am a total um "not a physics guy" just the armchair piece-together-what-i-can-repeat dreamer type. but heck yea thanks for the detail
will work for dragon quest localization
"Blackholes slowly dissipate over time as they give off energy in the form of gravity."
That's not true. Gravity is not energy that is "given off".
However, it is theorized that black holes slowly dissipate over time as they give off energy in the form Hawking radiation.
No. Black holes like the one being talked about do not loose much energy to gravitational waves. In order to dissipate energy via gravitational waves the mass must accelerate. So a pair of masses orbiting each other will shed gravitational energy, a galactic black hole sitting in the center of the galaxy does not move much and so does not emit gravity waves.
Regarding Hawing radiation dissipation, the temperature of the Hawking radiation is greater as the mass of the BH is smaller. In order to loose net mass, this temperature has to be larger than the CMB, which is only true for I think smaller than stellar size BHs.
our galaxy?
Anyone with some astrophysics background want to describe what this would be like? Is it directional? would we be fried if we were in the beam? or would it just look pretty in the day and night sky?
Just curious for someone in the field to describe it.
Dark matter, like any mass is affected by gravity, so there is likely great gobs of the stuff in orbit around galactic black holes. The issue with pulling in dark matter is the problem that dark matter does not interact strongly with anything, including itself. So there is no mechanism for the DM to loose angular momentum which would have to happen for it to fall in. So the only dark matter that gets eaten is the stuff that is on a trajectory that intersects the event horizon area of the BH. The reason that BHs can eat normal matter is because normal matter collides with itself shedding angular momentum; an accretion disc turns out to be an efficient way to shed that momentum and therefore an efficient way to feed a black hole.
I suppose that DM will eventually shed angular momentum because it will emit gravity waves as it orbits the BH, but that seems like a pretty slow way to do so.
I concur. Great Read!
Which star is Courtney Love dating now, then?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I thought this story would have been about Whitney Houston. *ba dum tsk*
To all you virgins: Thanks for nothing.
Reading the article I am struck by just how little fact and data this is based on. This is something that happened 2.7 billion light years away and this is one possible explanation for what happened. I have no idea of how likely it is to be the correct explanation, but I didn't read anything that told me that it was the only explanation.
With that in mind, I am happy to float the possibility that this flash in a very distant galaxy, very long ago, was actually a mega-strike in a intergalaxial war. I have absolutely nothing to back that explanation up, and nothing to gauge how likely an explanation it is. But I imagine that this would be how it might look. That gives it equal validity to this black hole story.
http://universesandbox.com/
Great little game\sim that you and your little brother (and anyone in this thread, really) might be interested in. I've spent a lot of time messing around with it, good stuff.
We've seen 2 in a year, how freakin rare can they be?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
No, gravity *is* energy. We view it as potential energy, but all energy is carried by particles [up to gravitons, which we are still looking for, but have not found yet].
The energy of gravitational wells has the ability to warp space, as is found in special relativity, and confirmed by experiments.
Now, I am not a physicist either: I have a degree in engineering [and did take physics, and have a family of physicists]. However, I am going to propose that I've long thought that gravity is a by-product of space, and that space is properly viewed as an energetic particle. But I will let you know that that is probably heresy.
The fact is, we don't understand everything about everything, including about physics and energy. But the energy of a black hole is its gravity [or whatever else formed the black hole: spin, charge, or whatnot].
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Do you have any theoretical reason to believe dark matter would be visible in the usual sense as it falls into a black hole (that is, by emitting photons), or is it just an interesting idea?
Yup, that's what I meant to imply. I imagine it would be extremely difficult to measure such "ghost effects" in exotic matter. One could make a nice sci-fi story out of them, though.
I did mean to put that I am a total um "not a physics guy" just the armchair piece-together-what-i-can-repeat dreamer type.
I know :). I don't think any physics people would use the phrase "Lord Nibbler poo at the completion of a black hole" or make the mistake of thinking a black hole has infinite mass and/or violates conservation of mass. But thank you for your honesty regardless.
Thank you. I understand now.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
It occurred to me because we know that normal matter emits gamma radiation as it falls into the black hole, but not knowing the mechanism that causes it means it might be done by all matter, including dark matter. There is probably evidence already disproving this idea, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless. It would have a certain poetic quality, though, if the only time dark matter were visible was during its disappearance.
Gravity isn't an energy dissipation at all. Other forms of radiation are from energy consumption (xrays, gamma radiation, even light) but gravity is closer to being a dynamic property of how mass interacts with space-time.
I'd be much more interested in knowing how the antimatter+matter collision energy gets held back within a black hole absorbing both.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)