Largest Eruption In the Known Universe Is ~100 Times the Size of Milky Way

StartsWithABang writes: At the center of almost every galaxy is a supermassive black hole (SMBH); at the center of almost every cluster is a supermassive galaxy with some of the largest SMBHs in the Universe. And every once in a while, a galactocentric black hole will become active, emitting tremendous amounts of radiation out into the Universe as it devours matter. This radiation can cut across the spectrum, from the X-ray down to the radio. At the heart of MS 0735.6+7421, there's a >10^10 solar mass black hole that appears to have been active for hundreds of millions of years, something unheard of!

Comments

Well

[ArcadeMan]

It looks like someone found out where the Fox News headquarters are.

They really do suck that much, don't they?

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh please, as if Fox News could produce that much energy, then they'd be useful for something.

Re:Well

[rubycodez]

I would argue with with duration and length of the ejected material that the galaxy BLOWS as much as Fox News

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

If only that hot air could be put to a good use.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

The two 640,000 light year cavities—seen in the X-ray—offer support for this idea.

There's that number again, thus proving that Bill Gates was right.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it's not you gibbering idiot...

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that not even Fox considers 'Fox News' to be a news program*, it would seem that a *lot* of peoples' assessments are more than a bit off-base.

* Fox News is classified as *ENTERTAINMENT* programming by the FOX network. They have argued in court that their viewers are intelligent enough to distinguish between Fox News as an editorial source, and actual news.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

I would argue with with duration and length of the ejected material that the galaxy BLOWS as much as Fox News

compared to the pristine unbiased nature of CNN?

Re:Well

[carnivore302]

If so, it took them a while. From wikipedia: Recent work done by Brian McNamara et al. (2008)....

Apparently this has been known since 2008. But remember, you read it first here on slashdot!

Still

[Anonymous Coward]

Still sucks less than your mum.

Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

/. is now the 'dice.com 'this is actually important'' dump, when it is not,
the 'mirroring reddit top stories' dump,
the 'look at my medium.com astro post' dump,
the 'what does this have to do with tech news?' dump,
the 'slashvertisement' dump,
the 'recycling "news" from other tech site, which are just rewritten corporate press releases' dump,
just a dump...

Re:Sigh

[war4peace]

You forgot the Bennett whatever-his-last-name-is dump.

Re:Sigh

[weilawei]

Don't give them any ideas. It's been a good while since we got bennettrolled.

foxnews holes

[Anonymous Coward]

we hereby rename this a FNH
FOX NEWS HOLE

Re:foxnews holes

[Anonymous Coward]

While Fox News may be sided it does report things no other news stations report. If you watch the libtard news outlets you need to throw in a bit of Fox to get the whole story.

Re: foxnews holes

[MichaelMacDonald]

Actually, no. Those 'EXTRAS' fox news throws in are called lies. Other news outlets tend to add spin to capture audiences. For the full story, talk to people that are there, go there, or do some thorough research on the internet. Fox will never bring more truth to the situation.

The article is in serious need of editing

[Anonymous Coward]

The article has 6 huge pictures without any caption explaining what we're looking at. That makes it closer to a desktop wallpaper collection than to an article.

Puzzled

[Anonymous Coward]

I never understood this. It is said that the black holes are black because not even light can escape them. And yet, they emit light? How does the light they emit escape?

Re:Puzzled

[dimeglio]

IANAP but I think it doesn't escape once in the black hole. However, on the way there, matter gets mangled and ripped apart which happens before it actually crosses the event horizon. This is where these emissions take place.

Re:Puzzled

[Anonymous Coward]

I never understood this. It is said that the black holes are black because not even light can escape them. And yet, they emit light? How does the light they emit escape?

No light escapes from the black hole. The radiation that we're detecting comes from matter in the accretion disk. A disk of gas and dust around the black hole way farther than the event horizon. This matter is heated and accelerated by the gravitational forces of the black hole. That's why they radiate. If this matter were inside the black hole's even horizon then yes we wouldn't be able to detect it cause once inside the event horizon there is no escape. It's all way down to the singularity with no hope of escaping.

Re:Puzzled

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's a bit like saying "McDonald's causes speeding tickets" because some people got speeding tickets on the way there?

Re:Puzzled

[jemmyw]

Yes, if the attraction of McDonald's was so great that it pulled people towards it at a speed greater than the speed limit.

Re:Puzzled

[war4peace]

Very simplistic analogy:
You rip a sheet of paper, it makes noise. Once you finished with it, no noise would ever come out of it, but someone in the distance hears it and says "the guy made some noise while tearing some paper".

Re:Puzzled

[amRadioHed]

Not at all, because that is not a special property of McDonalds. People get speeding tickets going anywhere and nowhere, McDonald's doesn't cause it.

Re:Puzzled

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok so in the same way, the observed radiation is not a special property of black holes. Matter emits radiation for a bunch of reasons, black holes don't cause it

Re:Puzzled

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they do cause it, because they cause a fucking great accretion disk to form around them, and they provide some fucking massive magnetic fields to help fuel the accretion disk too. What's so fucking hard to understand about this? Oh, yes, that's right - nothing. You're either a troll, a moron or, most likely, both.

Fuck you, and fuck this website.

Re:Puzzled

[penguinoid]

Black holes have massive gravitational and magnetic fields which do some rather violent things to matter that is near, but not in, the black hole. So while some stuff falls in, other stuff gets heated hot enough to emit x-rays, and some particles get ejected at tremendous speeds.

Re: Puzzled

[Anonymous Coward]

Signed -- ANONYMOUS COWARD!

Re:Puzzled

[thegarbz]

So it's a bit like saying "McDonald's causes speeding tickets" because some people got speeding tickets on the way there?

Given the mass of their clients it stands to reason that there would be a gravitational anomaly causing cars to speed up the closer they get.

Re:Puzzled

[ClickOnThis]

IAAP, although not an expert in black holes.

Even though black holes have an event horizon through which nothing is supposed to escape, it has been predicted that black holes can emit Hawking radiation at their event horizons, due to quantum effects.

Re:Puzzled

[schlachter]

it does seem to work like this, with bodies of larger mass being attracted to it with greater force!

Re:Puzzled

[schlachter]

due to time dilation, wouldn't those hundreds of millions of years (from our frame of reference) quoted in the summary be a much much shorter time window of from the reference from of the matter circling the black hole and emitting radiation just beyond it's event horizon? So that its' not the length of time that is unexpected, in some real sense, but the degree of time dilation? For all we know, it could have been a few moments of activity from that perspective.

Re:Puzzled

[ClickOnThis]

Somebody modded me down. Seriously? I'm just providing facts.

Re:Puzzled

[weilawei]

People get speeding tickets going [...] nowhere

How did you manage that one?

Never mind, dumb question. I got a ticket once for failing to use my turn signal--while going straight.

Re:Puzzled

[arth1]

it does seem to work like this, with bodies of larger mass being attracted to it with greater force!

Jokes aside, you're perpetuating a false belief.
It should be well known by now that gravity does not accelerate heavier objects any faster than lighter objects. The mass of the bodies is irrelevant if non-zero.
Ref Gallileo's alleged demonstration at the tower of Pisa.

Re:Puzzled

[Anonymous Coward]

it does seem to work like this, with bodies of larger mass being attracted to it with greater force!

Jokes aside, you're perpetuating a false belief.
It should be well known by now that gravity does not accelerate heavier objects any faster than lighter objects. The mass of the bodies is irrelevant if non-zero.
Ref Gallileo's alleged demonstration at the tower of Pisa.

So based on your clarification, it is the fact that bodies of larger mass and McDonalds have some sort of "Mutual Attraction"? Interesting!

Re: Puzzled

[Anonymous Coward]

Signed -- ANONYMOUS COWARD!

Alright kids! Get out from underneath my bridge unless you're going to bring me Jimmy Johns!

Re:Puzzled

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, you're the worse kind of pedant, the kind who is wrong.

It is indeed greater force (F = G * m_1 * m_2 / r^2)

Same acceleration due to /gravity/, but that's not actually what schlachter said.

Pop Quiz time: If you drop a 1 gram marble and a 1 gram feather, which one hits the ground first?

Re:Puzzled

[Pentagram]

The mass of the bodies is irrelevant if non-zero.

This isn't correct. Mass is relevant to acceleration by gravity, otherwise you'd fall at the same rate on the Moon as on Earth.

Re:Puzzled

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you, and fuck this website.

You realize that you look a bit odd saying, "fuck you," to Anonymous Coward when you are Anonymous Coward? Furthermore, I'm pretty sure you don't want to roll the Dice on fucking Slashdot.

Re:Puzzled

[Anonymous Coward]

+1, Thank you. GP has acceleration, force (weight), and mass all mixed up.

Remember kids, Force = Mass * Acceleration.

Re:Puzzled

[Dog-Cow]

The marble. Unless you are in a vacuum.

Re:Puzzled

[arth1]

I should have said that the mass of an attracted object is irrelevant if the attractor is stationary. Like, one presumes, said McD station was thought to be.

When the relative difference in mass between two objects go towards infinity, the amount of influence the mass of the lighter object has goes towards zero. The pull a car has on earth, an astronaut on the moon, or a star on a galactic center black hole is so small that for all purposes they can be disregarded, and the greater objects be considered stationary.

Re:Puzzled

[Anonymous Coward]

The force is equal and opposite, just accept your pedant fail with some tact, instead of trying to weasel out of it.

Re:Puzzled

[g0bshiTe]

Interesting mechanism thought to limit the amount a black hole can be consumed. Current thinking is that a black hole consumes, giving off energy in the form of jets and we get a quasar. A black hole will consume, and consume and consume some more, but they eventually consume so much that the mass of the black hole and the mass of the matter they are consuming begins to force objects outside of it's pull away from it, think toilet flapper that stops water after a flush. The black hole continues to consume the matter trapped in it's gravity emitting the energy until it's consumed all of the material in it's grasp. It's then thought to go silent or inactive. It's still there waiting for material to fall into it and it'll begin feeding again. This seems plausible otherwise what would stop black holes from consuming everything?

This is the current thinking around black holes at this time.

Re:Puzzled

[g0bshiTe]

That possibly doesn't apply to black holes, as their mass is ever changing based on what they consume.

Re:Puzzled

[Anonymous Coward]

I should have said that the mass of an attracted object is irrelevant if the attractor is stationary.

define "stationary"? Stationary compared to what?

Re:Puzzled

[amRadioHed]

You can joy ride without having any destination in mind.

Re:Puzzled

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there are a hell of a lot of citations needed around your summary of "current thinking"

Re:Puzzled

[schlachter]

I suspect my local McDs is traveling at 80% the speed of light!!! So I have to drive even faster than that to get to it!!

I just haven't found the right frame of reference in which I can prove it.

Anti-matter?

[dimeglio]

So that's where all the anti-matter went.

when reality is stranger than fiction...

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick quick somebody call James T. Kirk. We have a doomsday machine on our hands.

/. isn't your personal blog

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually enjoy reading these well written pop science blogs, but seriously, does every single post have to be featured on Slashdot???
This isn't your personal blog outlet.
No more "Startswithabang" please, unless it's actually News!!

yay medium.com linkspam

[Anonymous Coward]

now with extra wikipedia links to paper over the ugly spammishness a bit. yet no link in the summary to the "creatively interpreted" paper shamelessly ripped off for this bastard blog post.

Largest known?

[Tablizer]

The galaxy is about 2.6 light-years away. That's relatively close. That seems kind of a coincidental. A far away one would probably be detectable because it's so powerful.

Re:Largest known?

[d0ran$]

Try 2.6 billion light years!

From the article

"But 2.6 billion light years away, at the heart of galaxy cluster MS 0735.6+7421, the most powerful active galactic nucleus (AGN) ever discovered resides..."

Re:Largest known?

[Tablizer]

Sorry, that's what I meant. Still relatively close. The diameter of the observable universe is about 30 to 40 billion light years. The chance of the brightest radiation source being only 2.6 BLY away is close enough to suggest some kind of anthropic principle bias in play.

Re:Largest known?

[St.Creed]

I'd hate to be at just a mere 2.6 lightyears distance from an event that caused two volumes both 600000 lightyears across to be filled with hot, X-ray emitting gas.

Re:Largest known?

[Anonymous Coward]

lol. That's actually quite a long way off. The characteristic scale of a *cluster* is in megaparsecs, which is a few million lightyears. A few million lightyears. Have you any conception at all of what would involve an anthropic bias? Hint: not something far enough away that hundreds to thousands of clusters can lie in between.

Re:Largest known?

[careysub]

lol. That's actually quite a long way off.

He is right, that is relatively close for a Universe-record setting entity. Since we can see out to about 13 billion light years, this is in the closest 1% of the observable universe.

Re:Largest known?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the mechanism is more likely to occur given more time, e.g. requiring time to grow a large enough black hole, then the chances of seeing such events won't be even across the observable universe. Stuff closer to us has had more time to create such things.

Re:Largest known?

[Gavagai80]

The observable universe is actually about 92 billion light years across (radius 45 billion).

Re: Largest known?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's assuming these gigantic kind of SMBH are a rare phenomenon. They may not be - which would be the simpler hypothesis IMHO.

Re:Largest known?

[Anonymous Coward]

The observable universe is actually about 92 billion light years across (radius 45 billion).

Wow, you should get a Nobel prize man! You have proved that the universe is something on the order of 3 times as old as all the scientists who make money for doing this stuff for a living have been unable to do! Too bad you don't have evidence!

Re:Largest known?

[PTBarnum]

The light from the most distant objects we see has travelled about 13 billion light years to reach us. During the intervening 13 billion years, the expansion of the universe means that those objects would now be 46 billion light years away. So which number you use depends on how you want to define the size. I like the 13 billion number because it doesn't depend on any definition of simultaneity.

Source: http://www.space.com/24073-how...

Re:Largest known?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd hate to be at just a mere 2.6 lightyears distance from an event that caused two volumes both 600000 lightyears across to be filled with hot, X-ray emitting gas.

Don't worry you'd never get there and if you could "magically" appear there it wouldn't be for long.

Re:Largest known?

[Anonymous Coward]

He isn't right, not without a lot of references to simulations that can set up how unlikely this finding is in the context of LCDM cosmology. I'd be willing to put money on this being around a sigma or less away from expected - meaning that no-one, not even cosmologists, will pretend it's significant. That doesn't mean it's not an interesting find, but coating things in hyperbole is not helpful.

There are AGNs in the centre of a lot of galaxies. In particular, you should expect large AGNs in the centre of the massive galaxies near the centre of clusters. As has been noted (rudely, but noted), cluster scales are on the order of Mpc, and each cluster could expect at least some AGNs. I don't have numbers to hand, but my gut feeling is that this isn't some amazing "universe-record setting entity" but is instead exactly what those who found it have said it is - a massively energetic AGN that happens to be where it is.

Without reference to the statistics, which you're not going to get without running some pretty intensive simulations or some reasonably hair-raising (semi-)analytic computations, we can't say anything further.

Re:Largest known?

[david_thornley]

Counting time from the Big Bang, it's also in about the last 20% of the development of the Universe. If this sort of thing needs a lot of time to form (and I don't know whether it would), the reason we don't see more distant ones may be that there hasn't been enough time for the light to reach us.

Re:Largest known?

[mcswell]

Then on 25 May 2018, we're dead. Because that's 2.6 years from now (I allowed for on Leap Year day).

And yes, I saw the post below this one...

Re:Largest known?

[Tablizer]

That's indeed a plausible explanation for the apparent coincidence. Our view of the "recent" universe is essentially limited by the speed of light to a pretty small chunk of the entire universe. It's almost like being stuck with a cable service that plays mostly old reruns.

In space

[Anonymous Coward]

In space, nobody can hear the ten billion sun size black hole eating, which is a relief. Such a messy and noisy eater it is.

good

[khedr]