The nearest place where events with orders of magnitude more energy occur is just our atmosphere. Particles thousands of times more energetic, coming from yet undetermined sources in the Universe, strike the atmosphere (and the Moon, and the Sun, and all the other planets) all the time. Since the Earth is one of the smaller planets, it is more likely that such a theoretical black hole is created in, say, Jupiter or the Sun, than here.
I guess that whale hunters - sorry, whale scientists - would be more than happy to have these when they meet "eco-terrorists" - sorry, greenpeace activists / sea shepherds -?
It's amazing how many tabletop cold fusion experiments have attracted public attention, and all turned out to be fraudulent when they claimed to have started nuclear reactions. The worldwide large-scale not-so-cold fusion project ITER has just started, with an estimated cost of 5bn EUR, and there are still guys out there trying to outsmart them on a tabletop and some cookbook chemistry.
The problem is that these guys are high-energy physicists and not astrophysicists. They can't even start thinking about what else than 'fundamental physics' such as QG could cause this effect, because astrophysics reasons are messy, not fundamental, and progress in that doesn't make you publish in PRL. All this stuff is BS. Energy-dependent time effects are a hallmark of AGN, from radio waves to X-rays, and they have just reported that it's sometimes the same in gamma-rays. Reasons for time delays? Very simple: the radiation you see is the cooling from high energy particles. Cooling is the interaction from these particles (probably electrons) with fields. These fields can be magnetic, or photons. Gamma-rays are thought to come from electrons upscattering photons via the inverse Compton mechanism. This mechanism, in the limit of high energy electrons and low energy photons, is less efficient when the energy of the electron increases. So the low energy electrons cool faster than the high energy ones. There, this is the start of *one* sensible explanation that doesn't involve any unknown physics, but that they are yet incapable to mention.
Using astrophysical objects to test this effect - in this case, proving that light propagates at speeds lower than the speed of light when the energy increases - is a risky business. It assumes that the all the gamma rays are emitted at the same place and at the same time, propagate through the Universe, and are delayed during the trip to us. But there are plenty of good ol' well known astrophysical mechanisms that could fool you and emit lower energy gamma-rays before the high-energy ones, or generate them in different places, that would have the exact same signature as what quantum gravity predicts you would see. So, no, GLAST is unlikely to give the answer relatively soon.
You are right. Stars collapse, and can then form black holes or pulsars that have been measured to spin in a millisecond, exactly like this black hole. So why the fuss about black holes spinning at a kHz when pulsars already do?
I guess the Fabian guy should read his own paper - he's quoted on the poster's site saying "..the accretion disk, is angled at 45 degrees with respect to our line of sight. Such a precision measurement has not been possible before." and in the paper it is 38+/-4 degrees. The public knows only about increments of 45 degrees? Or maybe giving an error estimate isn't sexy enough?
And you think that peer review is a safeguard? Remember the Schon affair where all his papers were peer reviewed, the guy almost got a Nobel prize before he'd have to retire, and in the end it was all made up!
Give these guys credit for writing a paper that's too comprehensive to be written in Nature even though as they say "clearly the absence of such exotic dark matter would have considerable significance". I'm guessing that the significance of "no dark matter out there" are not in the field of physics but in politics and economy, like "what a waste of time and money!!" Getting through peer review at the Astrophysical Journal can take months, and if that's not a reason good enough to get it out unreviewed: if those two are right, then the solution was there to grab for anyone with a knowledge in GR calculations... and there's an awful lot of those!
From the NeoOffice website (check it out yourself if you don't believe it): "NeoOffice/J is fully functional and stable enough for everyday use."
The only software related "good enough for everyday use" I knew about so far was Scott McNealy's haircut.
you've gotta be careful with them nasa guys advertisements... Remember not so long ago they loudly claimed the discovery of pure quark stars which got prime time on NASA TV and then the story slowly died... Is there a funding deadline coming up sometime soon? Let's wait a month or two and see whatever comes out of it in peer reviewed places.
There's also people to bitch about the TV broadcast - this guy Jeffrey Bell has a lot of venom here on SpaceDaily. It is true that the broadcast was minimalistic compared to a lot of 100% NASA-managed (succesful) projects, but dude, getting into such ignorant political hatred when it's mostly a matter of a nonexistant PR budget..
One of the immediate consequences of Prez. Bush's "vision" is the extinction of space science by phasing out or transferring to the new effort funding previously set aside for existing launch programs. One of the victims of that "vision" is the "Beyond Einstein" project, a major project to solve questions about the origin of the universe, dark matter and black holes. Once again, the white house prefers to ride a horse (through the solar system) going "YEE-HAAA" than to fund fundamental science.
If we had to wait for one to go off in our direct neighbourhood chances are we'd be fried. The galaxy is transparent to radiation of that energy so a burst would be seen no matter where. And it better be far since the energies involved are such that one of the theories of dinosaur extinction is that they were wiped out by a gamma-ray burst within our galaxy! Here's the short story on that, and if you like the number crunching version better that's here .
Sounds about right - what about this one: "The critical density corresponds to somewhere between 2 and 8 hydrogen atom per cubic yard" (Alan Guth in "The Inflationary Universe"). Let's hope that God knows his conversions to the metric system better than NASA.
From the original paper it seems that the star cluster is quite young. That and the fact that very massive stars (which are very rare elsewhere in the Galaxy) are nearby makes it much more likely that this cluster has actually formed in the nuclear disk of the Galaxy. Quoting the authors "the IRS13E cluster is the possible core of an earlier massive star cluster formed about 10Myr ago within 20 parsecs of SgrA*"
-T
That this is a surprise depends on whom you ask. The real issue here is to understand how those huge f**off multi-billion solar mass black holes form. And so far there had not been such high-quality evidence for anything in between a stellar-mass black hole formed by a single massive star collapse, and those monsters in the middle of galaxies.
So those who think that they come from mergers of solar-mass BHs are comforted. There's also those who say that in no way those monsters had enough time to form by such a slow process. Read for instance Spin, Accretion and the Cosmological Growth of Supermassive Black Holes. Formation of supermassive black holes in turn is likely to have an impact on star formation rate in galaxies, another highly speculative area.
The other original thing here is that evidence for intermediate BHs in other galaxies comes from 1) luminosity measurements, which is a much more biased method than speed measurements of stars gravitating around it (to measure star velocities you have to be able to resolve them, which is only possible in relatively nearby objects) and 2) objects that were not in small clusters like here.
You can probably have an opinion on how cute the window manager is the way they show it. Come on, KDE and GNOME are no eye candy at least not the way Enlightenment used to be when it came out and when I used to DL their cvs stuff (and what d'y'all think about E17? I've been waiting for ever for DR17 but I got over it). So there must be a better way than a WM shot at the distro to show off a release.
Forget about solar wind - have a laser shooting at it. Some plans involve banks of lasers or microwave transmitters in orbit around the Earth or the Sun or even on the lunar surface to accelerate the craft, rather than using solar photons. With that you could reach 1/10th of the speed of light (about 300,000 km/sec), though there are other, rather more optimistic, suggestions that as much as half the speed of light could be obtained.
One of the major problems with these designs are the lasers would have to be prohibitively large to prevent the beams diverging at great distances. Further to this laser technology would have to be greatly improved to hit moving targets millions of kilometres away.
Either sign up on the Aurora Alert mailing list
or keep an eye on the realtime Kp index wherever you are. If it's night where you are now and you're not in the middle of a bloody thunderstorm then gtf out and look for auroras.
And if you're willing to pay $4.95 per month for it you can get the information brough to you by subscribing to the spaceweatherphone
Have fun down under - I heard you guys raise to hell and descend to heaven.
What slows down the nuclear-powered reactors in space is not much the technological problem involved but the political issue related to the use of nuclear energy in space. For a good report on thermoionics read e.g. http://www.nap.edu/books/030908282X/html/ (Thermionics Quo Vadis?)
Also keep an eye on the eccentric but pragmatic Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia who brought up the novel concept of utilizing the highly energetic fragments produced by nuclear fission to heat a gas. Extremely high temperatures produced in this reaction would enable faster interplanetary travel. Though interestingly he also states that this technology is not suited for interstellar travel (see http://www.spacedaily.com/news/fuel-01a.html
The Italian Space Agency has started feasability studies on this.
Slashdot Mirror
The nearest place where events with orders of magnitude more energy occur is just our atmosphere. Particles thousands of times more energetic, coming from yet undetermined sources in the Universe, strike the atmosphere (and the Moon, and the Sun, and all the other planets) all the time. Since the Earth is one of the smaller planets, it is more likely that such a theoretical black hole is created in, say, Jupiter or the Sun, than here.
I guess that whale hunters - sorry, whale scientists - would be more than happy to have these when they meet "eco-terrorists" - sorry, greenpeace activists / sea shepherds -?
30,000 lbs? Does it have to explode at all when dropped from a plane?
It's amazing how many tabletop cold fusion experiments have attracted public attention, and all turned out to be fraudulent when they claimed to have started nuclear reactions. The worldwide large-scale not-so-cold fusion project ITER has just started, with an estimated cost of 5bn EUR, and there are still guys out there trying to outsmart them on a tabletop and some cookbook chemistry.
The problem is that these guys are high-energy physicists and not astrophysicists. They can't even start thinking about what else than 'fundamental physics' such as QG could cause this effect, because astrophysics reasons are messy, not fundamental, and progress in that doesn't make you publish in PRL. All this stuff is BS. Energy-dependent time effects are a hallmark of AGN, from radio waves to X-rays, and they have just reported that it's sometimes the same in gamma-rays. Reasons for time delays? Very simple: the radiation you see is the cooling from high energy particles. Cooling is the interaction from these particles (probably electrons) with fields. These fields can be magnetic, or photons. Gamma-rays are thought to come from electrons upscattering photons via the inverse Compton mechanism. This mechanism, in the limit of high energy electrons and low energy photons, is less efficient when the energy of the electron increases. So the low energy electrons cool faster than the high energy ones. There, this is the start of *one* sensible explanation that doesn't involve any unknown physics, but that they are yet incapable to mention.
Using astrophysical objects to test this effect - in this case, proving that light propagates at speeds lower than the speed of light when the energy increases - is a risky business. It assumes that the all the gamma rays are emitted at the same place and at the same time, propagate through the Universe, and are delayed during the trip to us. But there are plenty of good ol' well known astrophysical mechanisms that could fool you and emit lower energy gamma-rays before the high-energy ones, or generate them in different places, that would have the exact same signature as what quantum gravity predicts you would see. So, no, GLAST is unlikely to give the answer relatively soon.
You are right. Stars collapse, and can then form black holes or pulsars that have been measured to spin in a millisecond, exactly like this black hole. So why the fuss about black holes spinning at a kHz when pulsars already do?
I guess the Fabian guy should read his own paper - he's quoted on the poster's site saying "..the accretion disk, is angled at 45 degrees with respect to our line of sight. Such a precision measurement has not been possible before." and in the paper it is 38+/-4 degrees. The public knows only about increments of 45 degrees? Or maybe giving an error estimate isn't sexy enough?
And you think that peer review is a safeguard? Remember the Schon affair where all his papers were peer reviewed, the guy almost got a Nobel prize before he'd have to retire, and in the end it was all made up! Give these guys credit for writing a paper that's too comprehensive to be written in Nature even though as they say "clearly the absence of such exotic dark matter would have considerable significance". I'm guessing that the significance of "no dark matter out there" are not in the field of physics but in politics and economy, like "what a waste of time and money!!" Getting through peer review at the Astrophysical Journal can take months, and if that's not a reason good enough to get it out unreviewed: if those two are right, then the solution was there to grab for anyone with a knowledge in GR calculations... and there's an awful lot of those!
From the NeoOffice website (check it out yourself if you don't believe it): "NeoOffice/J is fully functional and stable enough for everyday use." The only software related "good enough for everyday use" I knew about so far was Scott McNealy's haircut.
you've gotta be careful with them nasa guys advertisements... Remember not so long ago they loudly claimed the discovery of pure quark stars which got prime time on NASA TV and then the story slowly died... Is there a funding deadline coming up sometime soon? Let's wait a month or two and see whatever comes out of it in peer reviewed places.
And where is that screenshot? :p ./T
There's also people to bitch about the TV broadcast - this guy Jeffrey Bell has a lot of venom here on SpaceDaily. It is true that the broadcast was minimalistic compared to a lot of 100% NASA-managed (succesful) projects, but dude, getting into such ignorant political hatred when it's mostly a matter of a nonexistant PR budget..
One of the immediate consequences of Prez. Bush's "vision" is the extinction of space science by phasing out or transferring to the new effort funding previously set aside for existing launch programs. One of the victims of that "vision" is the "Beyond Einstein" project, a major project to solve questions about the origin of the universe, dark matter and black holes. Once again, the white house prefers to ride a horse (through the solar system) going "YEE-HAAA" than to fund fundamental science.
If we had to wait for one to go off in our direct neighbourhood chances are we'd be fried. The galaxy is transparent to radiation of that energy so a burst would be seen no matter where. And it better be far since the energies involved are such that one of the theories of dinosaur extinction is that they were wiped out by a gamma-ray burst within our galaxy! Here's the short story on that, and if you like the number crunching version better that's here .
Sounds about right - what about this one: "The critical density corresponds to somewhere between 2 and 8 hydrogen atom per cubic yard" (Alan Guth in "The Inflationary Universe"). Let's hope that God knows his conversions to the metric system better than NASA.
From the original paper it seems that the star cluster is quite young. That and the fact that very massive stars (which are very rare elsewhere in the Galaxy) are nearby makes it much more likely that this cluster has actually formed in the nuclear disk of the Galaxy. Quoting the authors "the IRS13E cluster is the possible core of an earlier massive star cluster formed about 10Myr ago within 20 parsecs of SgrA*" -T
FooAtWFU is right:
"The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest." Kilgore Trout (Kurt Vonnegut character)
That this is a surprise depends on whom you ask. The real issue here is to understand how those huge f**off multi-billion solar mass black holes form. And so far there had not been such high-quality evidence for anything in between a stellar-mass black hole formed by a single massive star collapse, and those monsters in the middle of galaxies.
So those who think that they come from mergers of solar-mass BHs are comforted. There's also those who say that in no way those monsters had enough time to form by such a slow process. Read for instance Spin, Accretion and the Cosmological Growth of Supermassive Black Holes. Formation of supermassive black holes in turn is likely to have an impact on star formation rate in galaxies, another highly speculative area.The other original thing here is that evidence for intermediate BHs in other galaxies comes from 1) luminosity measurements, which is a much more biased method than speed measurements of stars gravitating around it (to measure star velocities you have to be able to resolve them, which is only possible in relatively nearby objects) and 2) objects that were not in small clusters like here.
You can probably have an opinion on how cute the window manager is the way they show it. Come on, KDE and GNOME are no eye candy at least not the way Enlightenment used to be when it came out and when I used to DL their cvs stuff (and what d'y'all think about E17? I've been waiting for ever for DR17 but I got over it). So there must be a better way than a WM shot at the distro to show off a release.
Forget about solar wind - have a laser shooting at it. Some plans involve banks of lasers or microwave transmitters in orbit around the Earth or the Sun or even on the lunar surface to accelerate the craft, rather than using solar photons. With that you could reach 1/10th of the speed of light (about 300,000 km/sec), though there are other, rather more optimistic, suggestions that as much as half the speed of light could be obtained.
One of the major problems with these designs are the lasers would have to be prohibitively large to prevent the beams diverging at great distances. Further to this laser technology would have to be greatly improved to hit moving targets millions of kilometres away.
more about that on solar sails webpageEither sign up on the Aurora Alert mailing list or keep an eye on the realtime Kp index wherever you are. If it's night where you are now and you're not in the middle of a bloody thunderstorm then gtf out and look for auroras.
And if you're willing to pay $4.95 per month for it you can get the information brough to you by subscribing to the spaceweatherphone
Have fun down under - I heard you guys raise to hell and descend to heaven.
What slows down the nuclear-powered reactors in space is not much the technological problem involved but the political issue related to the use of nuclear energy in space. For a good report on thermoionics read e.g. http://www.nap.edu/books/030908282X/html/ (Thermionics Quo Vadis?) Also keep an eye on the eccentric but pragmatic Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia who brought up the novel concept of utilizing the highly energetic fragments produced by nuclear fission to heat a gas. Extremely high temperatures produced in this reaction would enable faster interplanetary travel. Though interestingly he also states that this technology is not suited for interstellar travel (see http://www.spacedaily.com/news/fuel-01a.html The Italian Space Agency has started feasability studies on this.
Even bigger!! http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0411/1713ma p_hess_full.jpg
Here's the image http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/03/supernova_ gamma_pic/