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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.
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?
I ain't a space scientist, and I hope that what I say is correct --- please correct me if I am wrong --- what TFA is saying is, Black Hole 1 (Point A) and Black hole 2 (Point B) are spinning with each others and we are at a fixed reference point (Point C)
In other words, Point A, Point B and Point C make up a triangle, with Point A and Point B spinning with each other.
What TFA suggests is that when Black Hole 1 (Point A) and Black Hole 2 (Point B) happens to link to the fixed reference point (Point C) in which the distance of AC = BC , the distance of AB = 450 Light Years
As I have said, I ain't a space scientist, if I am incorrect, please correct me, thank you !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
If we are looking at the system from "above", like looking down on a plate on which peas are rolling around, then the apparent distance between them is the same as the actual distance between them. If we're looking at them edge-on, then we don't really know how far apart they are. The apparent distance sets the lower bound for the actual distance, but the upper bound is unknown. And yes, there's always a degree of conjecture in astronnomy. All we can really say is that there are three black holes near the centre of that galaxy, and they are almost certainly in orbit around each other.
What people don't seem to understand is, science relies on publishing of un-proven theories. You observe, model, predict, publish, and eventually you will be either proven right or wrong. Without the "publish" step, especially in long-term sciences like astronomy where it could take centuries for a theory to tested (such as, "will that comet return in a hundred years"), you could make a thousand contradictory predictions and then publish the one that happened - by co-incidence - to be correct. If you limit yourself to a single prediction, which turns out to be correct, then you are worth paying attention to. My mum is always saying "Scientists keep getting things wrong, therefore all science is rubbish". Getting things wrong is crucual to scientific progress.
For all intents and purposes, the objects are the same distance from Earth. They're 450 light-years from each other and both are approximately 4.3 BILLION light-years from Earth. The maximum difference in distance between object A and Earth and object B and Earth is 0.000010465116% (450 / 4.3x10^9 * 100). Close enough to the same distance. For reference, the same delta applied to 1 AU (93,000,000 mile Earth-Sun distance) yields 9.73 miles.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
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.
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.
Parsing English is teh hard.
The "they" in that sentence refers to the two nouns preceding it.
1. The new-found pair [of black holes].
2. Earth
They're 450 LY apart.
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.