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NASA Uncovers Millions of New Black Holes
coondoggie writes "NASA today said its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite has unearthed a 'bonanza of new-found supermassive black holes and extreme galaxies called hot DOGs, or dust-obscured galaxies.' NASA said the latest discoveries help astronomers better understand how galaxies and the behemoth black holes at their centers grow and evolve together."
The news was released in a press conference, and io9 has a comprehensive write-up about everything that was covered, including the Q&A session. Pretty pictures here.
Quick, cover them back up, before they cool off!
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
So what they're saying is... they've found teenagers.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
In other news, NASA retracted their claim of millions of new black holes, saying "Someone spilled some coffee on the printouts, sorry..."
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, 'are there a million black holes waiting to hoover up all sentient life from the universe or are there 100 million black holes waiting to hoover up all sentient life from the universe? ' Well to tell you the truth, in all the chaos I myself can't remember how many black holes I made. So let me ask you, punk. Do you feel lucky ?
Black holes are heavy right?
Guess someone finally bothered to look at that thing, and found all these black holes
I'll bet these have been around longer than we have
It sounds like they just found a lot of 'missing mass' here? How does it jibe for balancing things without using 'dark matter/energy'?
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
That dark matter isn't so dark anymore in the IR range apparently.
Nothing is enough for whom enough is too little - Confucius
... nothing to see here, please move along!
Artist's concept of a dusty torus, or donut, of accreting material fueling a quasar.
There's a "WASH ME" car analogy in there somewhere... I just can't find it!
"The thing about a black hole - it's main distinguishing feature - is it's black. And the thing about space, the color of space, your basic space color - is it's black. So how are you supposed to see them?"
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Maybe now they can find all my missing socks.
find any new ones in space?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
"and extreme galaxies called hot DOGs, or dust-obscured galaxies.' "
all this talk of astronomy is suddenly making me hungry.
Google voice search is racist. If you ask "show me pictures of white people" a bunch of thumbnails of white people show up. If you ask "show me pictures of asian people" a bunch of thumbnails of asian people show up. If you ask "show me pictures of green people" a bunch of thumbnails of green (coloured) people show up. If you ask "show me pictures of black people" all you get is a text only Google search result.
Overly PC Google and overly "sensitive" niggers who think the world constantly owes them shit.
Not really, just an abundance of overly racist lowlife scumbags like yourself who cause companies like Google to create these measures because you all like to be vocal about your despicable racism and general douchebaggery.
Now hurry up and go rot in hell or whatever fictional afterlife you so choose.
Moron.
Hi different anon here - while my fellow anon poster may be crass in making his point - it still stands. It doesn't seem overly PC to you? To me it seems like the kind of overly PC move that actually legitimizes and maintains the racism it's attempting to overcome. After all, if "black people" are just like all other "people" why can I search for pictures of other groups, but "black people" are a special case? If no one cared, it wouldn't be an issue. Eventually someone has to be the bigger (wo)man, or the problem never goes away.
Have gnu, will travel.
all of the scientist can forget about this fantasy of dark matter to account for it?
I ain' lookin` fo` no mo` black hoes! Where da white wimmin be?
In a small way this helps reinforce my view that there's probably really no such thing as dark matter. It's just our model that is wrong. I'm sure a undergraduate physic major will come by and try to bury me in his text books, and in the end I can fully except that I may be wrong... It's just all too convenient.
Alice: Hey, I've observed that 6+4 = 12!
Bob: Yeah but really I think that 6+4 is probably 10.
Alice: no no, you don't understand the cleverness here, 4 in this case is a magic number that is used to represent all of the massive anti-digits in the universe that we just can't perceive! I've done the research, I've observed it...it has to be 12!
Bob: Yeah but can't it just be 6+6 equals 12? WHy are you so certain it's this magical 4?
Alice: Don't question science!!
Bob implodes at the irony of not questioning science.
WISE is one of Maitzer's projects. Amy is intelliganet and well-spoken and attractive and and has a Carl Sagan accent; very cool. This is the New NASA (JPL actually) along with the Bobak Mowhawk guy.
http://science.jpl.nasa.gov/people/Mainzer
It is election season....
Temperatures measured in pico-kelvins
They evaporate over vast expanses of time (googol years). They get hotter as the become smaller. But the time an event horizon is around atomic size, they can reach trillions of degrees.
"We've got the black holes cornered," said Daniel Stern of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., lead author of the WISE black hole study and project scientist for another NASA black-hole mission, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR). "WISE is finding them across the full sky, while NuSTAR is giving us an entirely new look at their high-energy X-ray light and learning what makes them tick."
So that's "cornered" as in "Nobody move, I've got you all surrounded"?
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
Why all this americanism? Lets do 'churros' next time -- celestial hypernovas universally renderes recognizable on search