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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?
You have to find a good mix in investing in the future and solving everyday problems *now*. And it’s very hard to make any argument about investing in the future to somebody who’s hurting today. You’re never going to win that debate, rationally or emotionally.
I read somewhere (http://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/jfk-and-the-moon-180947824/) that Kennedy, before deciding on using project Apollo as a technological showcase for America, actually considered a large-scale desalination project to help Third World nations.
What if Kennedy had chosen the latter option? How would the world have evolved since then? An abundance of water and food in Africa but no internet and supercomputer in everybody’s pocket? Or would the desalination have contributed little and computers evolved just the same? Nobody's arguing about his choices back then because we're all happy his mission succeeded.
In the end, again, it’s about finding the right balance in investing in every day problem solving *and* investing in things that help us forward in the future.
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Km and miles are useless in visualizing this. Please tell me how many schools buses lined up end-to-end will cover the distance between them.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I must say that was my exact reaction to reading it, whoever wrote that really needs to get some perspective
“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion."
Douglas Adams - The Restaurant at the end of the Universe
"She's furniture with a pulse"
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.
Fast forward 1000 years. Your flying car is running on essentially free energy thanks to its "gravity engine" (tm) which draws upon Physics so extreme, that to become aware them, you would have had to setup something as massive as a white dwarf orbiting a black hole, and study it for 30 years, before being able to reproduce this phenomenon in laboratory conditions, let alone miniaturize it.
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?).
Agreed!
A better way to put that into perspective would be to mention that that Moon's orbital path is 2,412,517.5 km (or 1,499,070 miles) and that if it were orbiting the Earth at the same speed as this star, it would orbit every 11.5 minutes (2,412,517.5 km / 12,600,000 km/hr), or 5 times an hour.
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.
I must say that was my exact reaction to reading it, whoever wrote that really needs to get some perspective, perhaps a nice car analogy.
Perspective?
We still shove hundreds of horses under a car hood to measure it's power, and we love to get hopes up when discussing habitable planets that are "only" a few light years away, while describing an object traveling 8 million miles per hour using a metric invented in the 18th century.
Hope that helps.
Here in the UK, our press uses the following units of measurement:
Distance: buses parked end-to-end.
Weight: elephants.
Area: Wales.
Please amend the article appropriately.
I recently saw an American claim that "the moon landing program did everything with a commodore 64 and hasn't contributed anything since". Which, if it was true, would mean they'd unlocked the secrets of time-travel considering that the Appollo program ended in 1972 and the first C64 wasn't actually built until 1980 - not to mention the Commodore64 was made-in-Britain: hardly an American contribution, when it was first unveiled American companies were flabbergasted at what it offered for 500-dollars, a price they couldn't come close to profitably matching. The answer, by the way, was vertical integration: Commodore owned their own Chip-FAB and this meant they could easily test multiple chip designs quite cheaply and iteratively develop their chips because they could quickly make one in-house to see how it performed. Exactly the OPPOSITE of the current model of "outsource everything and only focus on your core business".
Either way - the claim tells you something about the level of understanding many American's have off the issues they form opinions on - and even the latter part of the claim is flagrantly untrue. NASA has, in act, contributed greatly to computer science - among the most noteworthy achievements was the invention of clusters.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Note that a black hole is a spherical region in space that surrounds the singularity at its center; it is not the singularity itself"
So 'black hole' has the size, which is directly related to its mass. You can compute it here
https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/phy...
No actually - when they did it that was not where anybody else was heading. The supercomputing world was still ruled by Seymore Cray who was convinced that clusters could never compete with massive-chip systems in either cost or power.
And he still ruled the market.
NASA however, could not afford his computers anymore - and you know what they say about necessity and invention. So while others had theorised clusters before - nobody had tried to solve the issues of how to practically BUILD a super-computing cluster because the only game in the supercomputing town wanted none of it. NASA made them work - with beowulf - and it's noteworthy for it's impact (which was enhanced because NASA open-sourced the technology). Within two years the same idea was being used for redundancy and high-availability designs (expanding on the original 'build a cheap supercomputer' concept.
Every cluster in every data center in the world today is a direct descendent of NASA's design. It's a cornerstone of 21st century computing - and in the research side it's how EVERY super-computer is built now. But NASA pioneered it - when every expert thought it couldn't be done.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
It depends on how many timeouts are called and how many commercial breaks occur.
Wow, that would suck, 5 tide shifts an hour, or considering the menstrual cycle likely evolved its period from the Moon... nm, I don't want to thing about it,
That would be S0–2, a star orbiting Sagittarius A* - the gigantic black hole at the Milky Way's center.
S0-2 has a longer orbit than 47 Tucanae X9, because it is highly elliptical, but at closest approach to Sagittarius A* is reaches 5000 km/sec. The speed of 47 Tucanae X9 is 3500 km/sec.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I've worked on a number of systems that people referred to as 'beowulf clusters,' but not a single one was actually running the Beowulf software.
I see... so that's not a car, it's an automobile!!
I think you pedanted yourself right out of making any sense. What you describe are indeed Beowulf clusters.
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