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Two Supermassive Black Holes About To Embrace
Taco Cowboy writes "NASA's WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) satellite was looking at a distant galaxy, some 3.8 billion light-years away, and saw something rather unusual. At first they thought that they saw a galaxy was forming new stars at a furious rate, but upon closer checking, they found that they were seeing two supermassive black holes spiraling closer and closer to each other. The dance of this black hole duo started out slowly, with the objects circling each other at a distance of about a few thousand light-years. As the black holes continued to spiral in toward each other, they were separated by just a few light-years. Supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies typically shoot out pencil-straight jets, but in this case, the jet showed a zig-zag pattern. According to the scientists, a second massive black hole could, in essence, be pushing its weight around to change the shape of the other black hole's jet. Visible-light spectral data from the Gemini South telescope in Chile showed similar signs of abnormalities, thought to be the result of one black hole causing disk material surrounding the other black hole to clump. Together, these and other signs point to what is probably a fairly close-knit set of circling black holes, though the scientists can't say for sure how much distance separates them."
Two Supermassive Black Holes About To Embrace
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Given the countless galaxies, each with its own supermassive black hole, just like intersecting waves, the gravitational waves could theoretically act like waves in the electromagnetic spectrum, or classical physics experiments with waves. Some waves would cancel, others would be much larger than the 2 source standing waves, and thus would appear as a stronger signal to a gravitational wave detector, given said detector was sensitive enough.
Gravitational waves could also bring us closer to the point in time of the "big bang" than the cosmic microwave background radiation images. I sincerely hope this discovery, gives solid reason to develop said gravitational wave detector. Kudo's to the NASA WISE team!
They're looking at the wavy motion in the jet they put out - which is apparently showing a history of their interaction.
Did it really? I think that's a philosophical question. Personally, I think not only space and time but also cause and effect are relative to the spectator.
The light carrying the information that this is happening is just arriving here. The speed of light is also by definition the fastest information can travel. It may "in reality" have happened 3.8b years ago, but the effect can only now affect someone here. Even if you happened to have an observation post there and 3.8b years ago they noticed "hey, they're falling into each other NOW", and they sent that information right away, the information would not have reached us before the event since, well, the information of the event ITSELF is traveling at the speed of light, which, as stated before, is the fastest an information sent to us by the observation post could have traveled.
Long story short, the absolute moment in time when something happens does not matter as long as you cannot overcome its information propagation speed. It will of course change if someone happens to find a way to propagate information faster than the speed of light... which would open a completely different can of worms if you ask me (but that's beyond the scope of this post now).
What this all comes down to is that the absolute moment of some event does not matter, but only the relative moment that you receive the information.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.