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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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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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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"
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?).
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.
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.
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 *
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,