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Astronomers Find Star Orbiting a Black Hole At 1 Percent the Speed of Light (sciencealert.com)
schwit1 writes: Astronomers have spotted a star whizzing around a vast black hole at about 2.5 times the distance between Earth and the Moon, and it takes only half an hour to complete one orbit. To put that into perspective, it takes roughly 28 days for our Moon to do a single lap around our relatively tiny planet at speeds of 3,683 km(2,288 miles) per hour. Using data from an array of deep space telescopes, a team of astronomers have measured the X-rays pouring from a binary star system called 47 Tuc X9, which sits in a cluster of stars about 14,800 light-years away. The pair of stars aren't new to astronomers -- they were identified as a binary system way back in 1989 -- but it's now finally becoming clear what's actually going on here. When a white dwarf pulls material from another star, the system is described as a cataclysmic variable star. But back in 2015, one of the objects was found to be a black hole, throwing that hypothesis into serious doubt. Data from Chandra has confirmed large amounts of oxygen in the pair's neighborhood, which is commonly associated with white dwarf stars. But instead of a white dwarf ripping apart another star, it now seems to be a black hole stripping the gases from a white dwarf. The real exciting news, however, is regular changes in the X-rays' intensity suggest this white dwarf takes just 28 minutes to complete an orbit, making it the current champion of cataclysmic dirty dancers. To put it in perspective, the distance between the two objects in X9 is about 1 million kilometers (about 600,000 miles), or about 2.5 times the distance from here to the Moon. Crunching the numbers, that's a journey of roughly 6.3 million kilometers (about 4 million miles) in half an hour, giving us a speed of 12,600,000 km/hr (8,000,000 miles/hr) - about 1 percent of the speed of light.
You might be right. This might be a lucky find though in a larger project that does result in tangible benefits to society. And then I’m not against spending some more time to research it.
Your broader question might be about basic research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Basic research might not result in direct benefits, but a better understanding of natural phenoma can actually result in immense benefits.
In this case, for example, this might be the first object that we discovered that actually travels at speeds (in orders of magnitude) close to the speed of light. This could, for example, in the long run improve our understanding of relativity, properties of light and electromagnetism, etc.
If you realise how close some of our everyday technologies such as microprocessors, WiFi, etc. actually are operating close to the absolutes borders of physics, then you’ll understand that things we learn from basic research is the only way left to improve those technologies.
So, this finding *might* lead to some new understanding that *might* lead to new technologies that *might* lead to incredible new benefits to society. The only problem is, you don’t know in advance which research is the one with the big benefits. Spread your bets.
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Curious why a team of researchers from Australia (ICRAR) should pay for your tax cuts and military. Or were you asking the geopolitical education normal people get in middle school?
It provides insight into the laws of physics. We couldn't do the engineering we do without the basic science to back it up.
I'm sure sure that relativity seemed useless at first, but our GPS devices wouldn't work right if we didn't understand it.
Ok, I'll bite.
Most of tax money spent by your government will never benefit you directly. By "most" i really mean ALL of it, except tiny, tiny fractions of a percent.
This includes roads you'll never drive on, parks you'll never visit, government building you'll never step foot into, hospitals you'll never get treated at, employees you'll never need, etc., etc.
But getting back to the issue at hand, if you care looking at the linked documents from TFS, you'll see the contributors' universities:
1 Department of Physics, CCIS 4-183, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2E1, Canada
2 Department of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
3 International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research - Curtin University, GPO Box U1987, Perth, WA 6845, Australia
4 Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
5 Department of Physics, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA
6 School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
7 Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA, USA
8 NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA
#1, #3 and #6 are not USA-based.
#2, #4, #5 and #7 are universities which are most likely privately funded.
That leaves #8 as the only gov't funded location.
I'd say your tax money are pretty safe from this and would very likely be spent on genuinely useless endeavors which would never be of help to anyone.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Careful, your post makes too much sense. It may be moderated out of existence by the alt.truthers.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Rather spend my tax money on this than building fighter jets that can't fly in the rain.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Questioning the reason behind research is partly envy (why don't I get this cool equipment to play with?), partly missing imagination (why can't I think of anything this might be useful for?) and partly missing scientific education (why do I take everything I use today as a given without ever wondering how they work?).
Easy.
No-one knows where the next breakthrough will come from, so we let researchers study things they personally really want to learn, in the knowledge that some of them will discover things that are valuable.
The basic theory and implementation used in all wifi networks came about because of basic radio astronomy research - the very thing you're criticising - done by radio astronomers at CSIRO in Australia.
The world wide web came about as a side effect of basic physics research at CERN. All the money ever spent on CERN is far outweighed by the value and efficiency to commerce that the web has provided.
The foundations of computer science came about through fundamental research in mathematics and logic. No-one could have predicted that.
The foundations of evolutionary science, with all its benefits in agriculture, came about through a scientific voyage in the age of wind powered ships.
Lasers, the foundation of modern fibre optic communications, and of materials science, and manufacturing, came about through fundamental research in physics. Who could have known?
The foundations of modern genetic manipulation came about through research into bacteria in hot springs. No-one predicted that.
I could go on.
None of these things could have been predicted in advance.
If you insisted that we only fund things that are of immediate benefit, we'd all still be wearing raw animal skins and communicating by banging rocks together.
The costs of all the worlds unplanned fundamental scientific research are nothing next to the unknown benefits that some unknown researcher is coming up with today, doing something that you'd describe as wasteful and of no known use.