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Black Holes...Pink?
st. augustine writes "Australian astronomers have discovered that some black holes are actually pink. Here's a Wired article, and here's the Australians themselves. I was more excited before I found out they were already expecting the black holes to be blue. "
Boys and girls.
:)
The sightings of blue black holes have one simple explanation. Just take a look at the financial results of the IBM PSG, and there's the original Big Blue Black Hole (should that be BBBH?). Then take a look at the IBM managment, and you may also spot a lot of UFOs there...
Someone must've been on acid...
>For someone who acts so holier-than-thou, you should at least get your facts right.
I suppose I'm arrogant when excitable, yes. Consider me desecrated.
>The year that we measure on the planet is 365.24 days (hence the leap year every 4 years). A sidreal year is actually 366.24 years . . .
It's a variable quantity, yes, unless one knows what is meant by "sidereal". (Rotation, not measured against local conditions, "tropical" or the like, but physical rotation). Whom is "we"? Civilian? US Naval Research Lab scientist? Astronomer? Julian calandar, Lunar? After reading countless differing constant lists, the consensus as I view it seems to be 365.26 days (sidereal).
JPL Solar System Dynamics lists: Sidereal year (quasar ref.frame) 365.25636 d
Nine Planets holds at 365.26 days.
I'll consider JPL the authority. They've operated our most successful probes, after all else.
So, aye, I wish to know. Perhaps you're yet following this thread. Illuminate for me, sir or madam.
In '79 or '80 Disney made a movie of that name. Among the other criticisms of the movie was the complaint that the black hole wasn't black, but blue! You can't really win...
There are some points that proof didn't mention, such as that which as been speculated by Decartes, specifically, "I think, therefore, i'm spam." In this essay, written 3 years ago, i prove a similar finding.
for one, your a dumbass! I have a phd in physics and in math. Blackholes aren't exactly proven but excepted as real. If you go back further and ignore the popular stephen hawkins you will find a man named Finklestein. He is the pioneer of quantum relativity and he holds the foundations of blackholes! Well actually Einstein's work is what first predicted black holes but that is besides the point! Finklestein merged quantum mechanics with relativity and and layed a well respected theory. One of his popular diagrams is the pin rose diagram. It consists of the hyperbolas symetric with each other and the y axis. The limits are represented by two null lines. Basically it shows a cycle of the universe in which there are two parallel universes with the xaxis as the future of both parallels. Anyway, it also shows the equilibrium of the universe in which there is a finite space, time, matter, energy, etc.......... Therefore when too much mass is present in a given amount of space equalibrium must flurish. The result is and increase in space which causes the so called spacetime warpage. Another particle outside of the large mass must be in equalibrium with that space too so it has to become stable with that space so it is repositioned to do so. That is what gravity is. An illusion. All of the material I have stated plus more is well accepted and says that there must be blackholes. Now as far as them being pink, that is not the blackhole itself obviously. Nothing can escape the event horizon. However, any particles or light caught in orbit around the event horizon would be accelerated so fast that it would give off an enormous amount of energy due to collision and blue shift. Now it's not a big deal that it happens to be pink, that's just a random occurance in which the shift is just right to form the apperance of pink light. I would not consider the discovery of any importance. Sorry I could not go into detail but my English is poor, and I don't have time to go into too much detail or the ability to give equations. Enough has been said! Bye!
I'd guess they said "light year" when they meant "parsec", since a parsec is slightly over 3 light years.
i.e. Spam Can Totality
The acreation disk of a black hole has a much, much higher tangential velocity than radial velocity. So the red/blue shifts that you might see are primarily going to be orbiting on either side of the black hole, going towards or away from you. And as said before, the acreation disk is much, much larger than the black hole itself. (guessing off the top of my head from a video I saw, hundreds of thousands of times larger)
It's interesting how many times the fortune at the bottom of the screen is appropriate for posted news.
"Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere"
It would seem everywhere includes outer space as well...
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
They were expecting blue but got pink? Sounds like an all-too-common lament in some countries...
I was wising they were green :)
Commodore 64, Loading up the dance floor!
I prefer the spam option myself (only for black holes tho, not for eating or recieving in my mailbox :)
Commodore 64, Loading up the dance floor!
Fuzzy.. Sorry. I know it's bad..
"Windows 98 Second Edition works and players better than ever." -Microsoft's Home page on Win98SE.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
No, it's not Hawking radiation (as I tried to point out in the earlier "Clarifications" comment). Hawking radiation just wouldn't be intense enough, it gets weaker for larger bodies (like huge quasars). It wouldn't be pink either, but some pure blackbody temperature.
I dread the posting of items astronomical on Slashdot. The (*attempting to be judicious*) ignorance and jeering, peasant-like-tone, calls to question and account the elder statement that hackers match in their interests the pursuit of *science fiction*, an integral aspect of which is astronomy or at the least, astrophysics. But the queries here encoded? Abominable! I hail my fellow Anonymous Cowards (Scores 5 and 4) who anticipated the spate of questions and answered them.
All here, 't'would seem, hail Star Trek and Star Wars... but sit in discussing actual phenomena and knowledge of even our own mere star system like ignorant old European men discussing some 19th century war!
To answer a pair of (almost unasked) queries -
The speed of light is c. 299,792.4562 km/s. Rounding to 3EX is useful for rough estimates, but when one wishes to assess the highly dependent values such as the distance to a given Cepheid variable, such rounding *would not* occur!
How long, then, is a light year? This, too, may depend on the astronomer's hewing to his or her art. The civil year is measured as being 365.0 days of 24 hours - but the sidereal year (the actual momentum of the planet) measures as 365.26 rotations, each 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds in length. Multiply the value of C by the sidereal to determine a light year, if you wish.
A parsec is 3.2616 light years in length... it derives from the measure of parallax on the dome of the sky, helping to measure proper motion and the like. Barnard's Star, a dim red dwarf, was discovered and made known as remarkable for it's proper motion, greatest of any star! It is only 5.2 light years distant. Doubtless many such red dwarfs arc nearby in this our section of the galactic disk, hidden by their radiative obscurity.
I despair for our culture. We seem to be regressing toward the primitive expansion of old human memes within a terrestrially advanced framework rather than rising to the sublime. But, what may I expect? Observe those men who walked on Luna and saw the glories of our world in the 1960s - they could hardly be named pioneers or visionaries, or revolutionaries! Only one of them was a scientist (the geologist of Apollo 17). John Glenn, *snort* - a politician, and most actually believe that he walked the Lunar regolith. We are surrounded by our wondrous networking technology (and yet arguing over ludicrous obvious issues such as whether our operating systems should be open engineering works), but how many of you feel that the future the old stories promised has come? Belter cultures, Lunar cities, Martian wars of independence? How prefer you instead, "Congress would like to pass the US Space Shuttle to business and fly it until the 2020s"?
As I posted this, I was notified that the International Space Station was passing overhead. Due to my presence in the city and it's low altitude, I was unable to see it on this pass. But I observe it when I may! A strange sight, to see that star-like object moving through the sky so quickly, still stranger to *know what it is*... but how many of you look up even to the few works our hands have acheived?
Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:
Essentially, I have to agree with the general point of your posting. People these days spend too much time reading Sci-Fi and not enough time actually reading about science.
Sci-Fi is not about science, it's about our own terrestrial obsessions projected onto a bunch of aliens.
As a point in case, just consider the amount of Sci-Fi which is set here in the solar-system versus the amount which is set on *habitable* planets around other stars.
Having discovered that there are no easy frontiers here in our own backyard, we ignore the possibilities and look elsewhere, in spite of the enourmous resources in terms of material and energy that we could tap.
In short, most Sci-Fi looks at the past. It's an attempt to re-enact the process of European colonialism on a larger scale. Because of that, few people are interested in anything that isn't a habitable planet.
Still, things are gradually changing. The terra-forming of Mars is gradually coming into the conceptual realm of the general public and it may simply be a matter of time before we re-adjust our perspective away from terrestrial obsessions. Unfortunatly for me, it's not likely to be during my lifetime though.
It's not offensive or anything, it's just humour
Maybe I don't get it....
---
"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
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"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
To my knowledge, relativity and qm have not been merged, that is the whole point of all the work that has been done on grand unified theories (guts).
You wouldn't happen to be from Fresno would you? People from Fresno might be able to confirm your theory. (Now that's an obscure reference, anyone get it? ;)
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
The same precise conversion is done in measuring all their distances.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Then I wanted to sneak those two zeros in there.
oops.
thanks.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
I thought at first, oh, they're just using a British billion (a million million) but that would have put them off by a factor of 10.
Good question, and even more interesting that the same calculation is repeated in all their distance measurements.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Hmm, yes, it's only a theory, probably the best but have they had any major breakthroughs with the observational data in the last few years?
I'm just interested to know.
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
Why do they assume that quasars and black holes are one and the same thing? I know there are theories about the "power source" of quasars being not larger than a certain size because their luminosity varies with a certain period, so the speed of light limits the size etc.
In the last few years, what new findings have their been?
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
When I said about and approximate, I mean +/- a much smaller delta than a factor of three. eg. The speed of light in a vacuum is 3e8 m/s +/- 1e7 m/s (a far cry from saying its between 1e8 and 1e9). Same for the 9.5e15 (+/- 1e14). It's called significant figures.
The issue is that they used the exact same (incorrect) conversion for each place that they mentioned a light-year to kilometer conversion.
Now, on the other hand, if I were approximating with logarithms, and took an exponent (either that, or I looked at a slide rule with a severe astigmatism), I could expect a factor of 3 error very easily, because that's a linear error of only 0.5 in the log10 domain.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
When I took all of my science courses, I was taught that 1 light-year == the distance light travels in one year in a vacuum. In the article, they mention the following:
In other words, one billion light-years is 3e25 meters. Interpreting one billion as 1e9, this implies that one light year is 3e16 meters.
Now, if I recall correctly, the speed of light in a vacuum is approximately 3e8 meters/second. There are approximately 3.16e7 seconds in a year (365.24 * 24 * 60 * 60). Multiplying these together gives me a light-year of about 9.5e15.
So, is it just me, or are their light-years off by about a factor of 3?
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
This was my thought.
If the black hole is sucking in gas towards the viewer, it will appear to be blue (shorter wave length)
If the direction of suck is away from the viewer, it ought to appear red (longer wave length).
And if the acretion disk were viewed edge-on, one would see both red- and blue- shifted light.
I'm no high-energy astrophysicist, but doesn't this explanation make sense?
Glad to be of service! Share and enjoy!
-- Some things are to be believed, though not susceptible to rational proof.
So is the "pinkness" the result of Hawking Radiation from the black holes? Steven Hawking (did I spell his name right?) predicted many years ago that black holes emmitted radiation - kind of combining gravatation theory with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
I recall seeing a TV program in England about 1982/3 where Hawking said that if they ever actually found his radiation, he would get a Nobel Prize.
Well, I am sure that these Australians would have thought of this (since Hawking Radiation is rather well known) and maybe it just isn't in the right frequency range.
(P.S. that TV show had a 1 second shot of me crossing the street - I just happened to be in front of the camera when they were filming Trinity Street in Cambridge.)
Denser clouds would heat more by friction, pushing it from red-hot to yellow-hot to blue-hot. . .or would it ???
As far as a doppler effect due to rotation, no. The effects of a receding edge would effectively be countered by the approaching edge. . .
I agree, but wouldn't much of the material being drawn toward the observer be located on the oposite side of the event horizon so as to be out of sight. It seams the net affect would be more of the visable acretion disk would be red shifted. Another question: Is the relative velocity of the acreting material with respect to the object great enough to be significant when compared to the expansion of the universe?
Sorry, I should do some research, I'm not much of an astronomer yet...
oh sh-- just wait untill the rev jerry falwell hears about this...
Point and Grunt
Could the light be redshifted? Perhaps one side is orbiting away from us so fast it is redshifted to pink? But then you'd expect the opposite side to be blueshifted...is the telescope resolution high enough to see that?
I still say we go with the Red Dwarf idea.
Find 100 perfect suns in the right combination, make them all go nova, so all around the universe everybody can read....
Enjoy Coke.
And now after that happens the big novad stars will be a cute pink. What a beautiful universe.
It's turtles all the way down.
For someone who acts so holier-than-thou, you should at least get your facts right.
The year that we measure on the planet is 365.24 days (hence the leap year every 4 years). A sidreal year is actually 366.24 years . . .
Just thought you might want to know. . .
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
How is it possible that the velocity of the jets exceeds c? It should never exceed c from _any_ reference frame.
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
It's not the velocity of the jet that exceeds c. It's the velocity of the spot illuminated by the jet. Things like that are called superluminal sources because they _appear_ to go faster than light. Imagine you shining a flashlight on a wall. If you turn the flashlight fast enough, the spot on the wall will move faster than the speed of light even though the flashlight isn't. There are superluminal sources in the earth's atmosphere during thunderstorms (caused by an em pulse from lightning propagating upward from the cloud).
Pink holes
When seeking information on the Internet about important new developments in astrophysics, using the search term "pink holes" will probably not give you completely satisfactory results with most search engines, even though the hit count may be large.
These objects are distant quasars. The quasar population was largest when the universe was around a third of its present size (a redshift of 2) and about a fifth (specifically, one 3*sqrt(3)th) of its current age. At this distance, which is around ten billion light years, the resolution of ground-based telescopes is around five thousand light years (this is a limit set by the Earth's atmosphere). So we know that the whole galactic nucleus of the host galaxy, as viewed by us, is "pink". A quasar should dominate the light output from this region- and the light is emitted from a region a few light-days across. This is known because quasars vary in brightness on timescales of weeks.
When astronomers refer to colors, typically "red" or in this case "pink" refers to emission of larger amounts of light at long wavelengths at short ones. Given the telescopes used, I would guess that they were observing in the "optical" band, which is from around 350 nm (near UV) to around 800 nm (infrared). These would be emitted by the quasar as UV and would lengthen into this band in the observer frame. At redshift 2, these would be emitted at 117 to 267 nm. So, a better headline would be "black holes found to emit more near-UV than far-UV". Of course, this wouldn't be very striking.
The accepted mechanism for quasar action is that matter falls toward a black hole, collides with other matter, and emits radiation. In fact, there is an equilibrium where the matter falling in produces enough radiation that radiation pressure keeps more matter from falling in. This process should be very hot and so should produce light that is "blue" even in the far UV region.
There are, however, some additional details of the procedure. Some quasars have what are called "jets" of ejected material. We know these are extremely fast because the apparent velocity across the line of sight exceeds the speed of light in many cases. This is allowed by relativity if the jet moves at a speed near the speed of light pointing directly at us. The jet phenomenon is believed to be connected with a preferred axis of rotation for the material falling into the black hole, and with "synchrotron radiation" emitted by charged particles accelerated by the black hole's gravity. The report seems to suggest that the "pink" light is connected with the jet phenomenon, perhaps in cases where the jet is pointed directly at us.