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Black Hole Plays Pool With Plasma
the monolith writes: The Hubble Space Telescope is revealing that there is a pool game in progress, with a long shot being played out on a cosmic scale. It appears that the first recorded shot was observed in 1992, while subsequent canon shots were recorded between 1994 an 2014. In actuality, the shots are plasma, the current player is a black hole, and the playing surface is galactic space itself. The BBC has a story on the observations and interpretations, while the journal Nature has the paywalled in-depth article. The current score is unknown, and one can only hope that there were no life forms involved in the collision.
I read of one planet in the seventh dimension got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole, killed ten billion people.
While the playing surface is usually 2-D, the balls have always moved in 3-D in the games I've played. When the players are bad, the balls arc through the air to land on the floor/go through a window/etc. When the players are good, use of english means that the balls are accomplishing specific rotations that influence the other pieces with a decidedly non-2D physics model.
So if these plasma balls aren't on a 2-D plane, it's highly probable that this black hole just isn't very good. Most black holes are more subtle, putting a spin on their galaxies and taking their time with the collisions.
shouldn't be allowed to write about science.
What's with the cutesy headline? "Shock collision in black hole plasma jet," is pretty sensational on its own, and actually tells us something. Maybe more people would have read the article and we'd have a discussion here instead of crickets.
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http://arstechnica.com/informa...