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Trio of Big Black Holes Spotted In Galaxy Smashup
sciencehabit writes Astronomers staring across the universe have spotted a startling scene: three supermassive black holes orbiting close to one another, two of them just a few hundred light-years apart. The trio, housed in a pair of colliding galaxies, may help scientists hunting for ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves.
Why did I read that as nipples in space time
may help scientists hunting for ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves
Or more accurately, black holes waving.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
just 450 light-years apart and orbit each other every 4 million years.
I can't stop thinking that a four million year orbit means humans will have populated that galaxy before those black holes have completed one more cycle.
We're like smart bacteria inside a human being. We could learn about the season cycle, but but the time winter comes, innumerable generations of our descendants will already have killed our host and traveled to other ones.
Since that galaxy is some _4.3 BILLION LIGHT YEARS_ away from us, what we see today is what was happening to them 4.3 billion years ago
Would 4.3 billion years long enough for those 3 supermassive blackholes to merge ?
When a blackhole (BH-A) being swallowed up by another blackhole (BH-B), what would happened to the content which were already stored inside (BH-A) ?
Would the content inside (BH-A) exit (BH-A) before they are re-sucked into (BH-B) or would (BH-A) acts like a bag, being swallowed up by (BH-B) as a single entity ?
The article states
If the two black holes composing the newfound pair are equally distant from Earth, they're just 450 light-years apart and orbit each other every 4 million years.
Can someone explain, or is this a typo? Do they not know if they're the same distance? Are they saying there's a possibility that the black holes aren't orbiting each other, aren't that close, and the whole thing is conjecture?
how do you figure out that they circle each other when the light takes a few billion years to travel here from each, and these things take 4 million years to orbit each other? probably some rather significant difference in the time it takes for the light to get here from each too. just curious..
..is he, is he?
In 1911, Charles F. Kettering, with Henry M. Leland, of Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (DELCO) invented and filed U.S. Patent 1,150,523 for the first electric starter in America.
So glad I don't have to start my car the same way I start an old lawnmower.
I learned one important thing from that web site: It was programmed by yet another clown who feels it's vital to have a menu overlay taking up 25% of my scarce phone screen real estate.
I propose a Constitutional amendment to execute them. Whoever decided tiny screens need to be even tinier deserves it.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It's certainly a Monster Mash. but as the gravitational churning is likely to stimulate extensive star formation in the galactic core, it likely does not constitute a Graveyard Smash.
Internal fuel would do us no good. Notice that the LHC can't rely on photons' internal fuel. In order to get them puppies off their butts and straighten up and fly right at very high speeds relative to us, we have to pour in EXTERNAL fuel. A common question is, "Can a motorcycle go the speed of light using the fuel it has in its tank?" The answer is, "No, the motorcycle must use energy from the universe its embedded in." We don't need no steenkin fuel. What we need is an engine that gathers external sources of energy to convert into motion.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
From the headline, I thought this was a story about damage to a smartphone.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Galaxies usually orbit around a massive round one in their cluster. The shape of spiral galaxies is produced by the shape of the fabric of space time as they approach each other at the end of their cycle. After they pass each other they change shape and will evolve into every type of galaxy shape until they finish the cycle as a spiral. The orbiting galaxies flip when they reach the farthest distance from each other and start back on another collision course. Each shape is specific to their position of the cycle.
The speed of light is a hard limit on what it means for an event to propagate through spacetime. It is the fastest that the universe will convert one dimension into another. The corollary to this is that if anything does travel faster than light, you can construct a reference from in which that object will be seen to be traveling backwards in time. This is bad news for those of us who like causes to precede effects. This relies of course on Relativity, which while not being a complete description of the Universe, has been confirmed on every observable scale from the sub-atomic to the intergalactic. There are holes, but no observations so far which allow FTL, and as a matter of personal preference I would rather have causality than FTL.
Many people have been wrong, even Einstein, but he wasn't wrong about Relativity. Intergalactic space travel is impossible in human timeframes, and will remain so forever.
The speed of light is a hard constraint, akin to the "clock rate" of the universe. It is the greatest possible change in spatial coordinates for a given unit of time. Thinking of it in terms of a speed or speed limit is less useful: it's a fundamental property of the universe. One consequence of this is that photons do not experience time in any meaningful sense between emission and absorption. Another more relevant consequence is that if any event (e.g. a spacecraft) does exceed the rate of event propagation (i.e. c) then you can construct a reference frame in which that event is observed to be propagating backwards in time. The speed of light and causality are fundamentally linked. If you want a universe in which FTL exists, you want a universe in which effects can precede their causes.
There is room for Einstein to be wrong. However, Relativity (and by extension causality) has been confirmed on every scale that we have been able to observe so far, from the sub-atomic to the intergalactic. Beyond that there is some gray area, but you'll note that we do not experience the universe at either extreme; whether or not Relativity applies to sub-sub-atomic particles, it certainly applies to us. It is an accurate description of the geometry of the universe at human time and distance scales, and at human energy levels, and at scales and energy levels far beyond what humans can harness. In order for what you want to be true, Einstein would have to be wrong -- not wrong in the sense that Newton was wrong, but wrong in the sense that the Flat Earth Society is wrong. And at that point we may as well give up science; if causality isn't true then empiricism takes a pretty hard knock.
You and Thanshin should quit spamming this thread with examples of human ignorance and rectify some of your own. Your argument is not very far removed from saying, "But we don't know everything about gravity! Maybe in the future things will fall up!". It's not entirely ludicrous to suggest that events can propagate through spacetime faster than events can propagate through spacetime, or that spacetime can be warped such that the shortest path between two points is less than the "true" distance, but it's at least 99% ludicrous, and championing the narrowest of possibilities while being ignorant of the (well-tested) established theory is not very rational. The geometry of spacetime is very strange and unintuitive, but if you're going to argue that it could be different then you should probably know how it works first.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.