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Astronomers Discovered the Fastest-Growing Black Hole Ever Seen (wral.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader Yhcrana shares "some good old fashioned astronomy news." Astronomers have discovered "a black hole 20 billion times the mass of the sun eating the equivalent of a star every two days," reports the New York Times.
The black hole is growing so rapidly, said Christian Wolf, of the Australian National University, who led the team that found it in the depths of time, "that it is probably 10,000 times brighter than the galaxy it lives in." So bright, that it is dazzling our view and we can't see the galaxy itself. He and his colleagues announced the discovery in a paper to be published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia...
The blaze from material swirling around this newly observed drainpipe into eternity -- known officially as SMSS J215728.21-360215.1 -- is as luminous as 700 trillion suns, according to Wolf and his collaborators. If it were at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, it would be 10 times brighter than the moon and bathe the Earth in so many X-rays that life would be impossible. Luckily it's not anywhere nearby. It is in fact 12 billion light years away, which means it took that long for its light to reach us, so we are glimpsing this cataclysm as it appeared at the dawn of time, only 2 billion years after the Big Bang, when stars and galaxies were furiously forming.
The blaze from material swirling around this newly observed drainpipe into eternity -- known officially as SMSS J215728.21-360215.1 -- is as luminous as 700 trillion suns, according to Wolf and his collaborators. If it were at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, it would be 10 times brighter than the moon and bathe the Earth in so many X-rays that life would be impossible. Luckily it's not anywhere nearby. It is in fact 12 billion light years away, which means it took that long for its light to reach us, so we are glimpsing this cataclysm as it appeared at the dawn of time, only 2 billion years after the Big Bang, when stars and galaxies were furiously forming.
An attempt was not made.
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If you can see All the Light there of trillions of them Suns. I want my black Holes to be black. Gigidy.
Tardchris's irrelevance?
If it's been growing for that long just imagine how big it must be now. Probably eats 2 galaxies a day now.
Silly Rabbit! Rich people don't go to prison.
Since the universe is only about 6000 years old, this thing can't be 12 billion years old. More fake news.
So this is where my money has been going..
It is in fact 12 billion light years away, which means it took that long for its light to reach us,
No, that is not what it means. It took no time for the light at all to reach us. Time passes slower and distances become shorter the faster you go. Travelling at c, the Lorenz factor for the light itself is infinite, and no time passed for it.
What it means is that if light had been governed by Newtonian physics, it would have taken light 12 billion years to get from there to here.
But Newtonian physics turned out to be only an approximation for low speeds, and was overturned a century ago. Einstein discovered that time is a local phenomenon, and that it is meaningless to use phrases like "ago" for relativistic speeds and distances - no two clocks will ever agree, and may disagree by billions of years.
Whenever I see news like that, it reminds me that we're not really "seeing" anything. We just get tons of astronomic data, basically piles of photons and neutrinos and muons and god knows what, with different frequencies and spins and all that. Then we take that data, and start working towards mapping it all onto our continuously evolving and obviously imperfect theory what all that actually means. So astronomers in the end decide what the data means, and then you have these sensationalist articles in the media about "the things we see". Over time, theories will change, data will prove to be imperfect or contain some margin of error previously unaccounted for, etc, etc. So articles like this are quite meaningless. There is real data with real impact on the theory, but it's also very likely that data like that will over the long term change the theory and our understanding of the universe, with the sensationalist concepts of "giant black hole eating up whole galaxy" simply dying the way of the dodo. Good job astronomers for expanding the human knowledge! But let's take the sensationalist sentences with a grain of doubt.....
So it is younger than 2bilion years according to the "official" universe age. How comes it became so huge in so little time?
12 billion years has passed and if it consumed a sun every day... It must be quite large by now.
Yes it is a gravity well. But given the amount of radiation it is emitting the name "black hole" seems wrong. They need a new name for not just the dense object but also the spinning plasma field around the super dense region.
Sounds like the cookie monster of the cosmos. By the time a lot of the light from the stars reaches us, the star could already be dead or consumed. Astronomy never fascinated me all of that much but the sheer size of the universe is simply awe-inspiring. The light that we see from these distant stars could be coming from dead ones and we would never really know it. That, in of itself, astounds me.
Astronomers Discovered the Fastest-Growing Black Hole Ever Seen
Oxymoron that.
Scientists can't directly observe black holes with telescopes that detect x-rays, light, or other forms of electromagnetic radiation. We can, however, infer the presence of black holes...
https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/black-holes
Americans believe that the earth is 6000 years old, that climate-change is a global conspiracy to tax them more, that evolution is "just a theory" and that vaccines cause autism.
And you want to talk to them about cosmology and black holes ?
Why do scientists even waste their time anymore is this rationality-sucking black hole that is the U.S. ? Why don't they move out of the country to a place where their intelligence and knowledge will actually be desired and valued, and let americans rot in their miserable supersticious barbarian shithole once and for all ?
Imagine an ant growing to the size of blue whale overnight in your backyard, yet you donâ(TM)t see or feel any of its effects because speed of light is just few inches per a day.
> Travelling at c, the Lorenz factor for the light itself is infinite
No, it's not travelling at C, "for it".
Also did you mean Lorentz factor? More importantly, did you forget the "relative" in "relativity"?
If you look at it from the light's reference frame, it didn't move, and there's nothing to talk about. It's moving at C only from *our* reference frame. Therefore the only reference frame that's useful to discuss, the reference from from which something happened, is ours. The frame in which it took 12 billion years for the light to reach us.
12 billion years old.
Look at this guy, tight as a ten year old. Jared must love you and give you Subway footlongs all night.
So, it's super massive and super bright and you can't post a fucking picture of it? FML.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
So a star managed to get to this size after only two billion years of universe time, and by that time, (billions of years ago,) got to be an ultra-massive black hole? I'm not astrophysicist but SOMETHING doesn't add up here. (This strikes me as being rather like hearing a businessman insist his company's business model is sound, even though he loses money on every deal, because he "makes it up on volume," and then realizing he's not joking. Either someone doesn't understand what "loses" means, what "money" means, what "every" means, or what "deal" means... or someone has cooked the hell out of the books. Personally, it seems to me that the error here is that from the observation that everything seems to be moving away from everything else, cosmologists concluded that this implies that decreasing density as a function of time necessitates that all prior times exhibited the characteristic of HIGHER density, but this is never observed, for obvious reasons, (no one has a time machine AND a telescope; instead they act as if their telescopes ARE time machines, and while it may LOOK that way from one perspective, that's very much NOT true from others. That is, pretending the telescope IS a time machine does NOT yield results that are identical to those you'd get if you had an ACTUAL time machine, AND a telescope. Then things would be very different.
TL;DR: I don't buy this. Cosmologists and astrophysicists are making cauldrons of stew with one thing that may or may not ever have been an oyster.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
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Hello again son!
My name is Christopher Dale Reimer and I am positive that I can help you in your positive and humble mission.
I have a lot of experience working for 3 letter agencies in America and I can help you with your marketing strategies.
You can reach me here:
https://slashdot.org/~Anonymou...
Alternatively:
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Donald. Is that you?
TRIGGERED!