Astronomers Dissect a Supermassive Black Hole 77
Matt_dk sends along a piece from the European Southern Observatory, which reports on observations of the so-called "Einstein Cross," a fortuitous conjunction of a nearby galaxy and a distant black hole. A team of researchers from Europe and the US combined the effects of macrolensing (from the intervening galaxy) and microlensing (from stars in that galaxy), captured by an earth-bound telescope. "Combining a double natural 'magnifying glass' with the power of ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have scrutinized the inner parts of the disc around a supermassive black hole 10 billion light-years away. They were able to study the disc with a level of detail a thousand times better than that of the best telescopes in the world, providing the first observational confirmation of the prevalent theoretical models of such discs."
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For the first time, a first post linking to goatse under a science article may be considered on-topic.
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For once, it's relevant. (Score:1, Funny)
N/T
rest of sentence (Score:5, Funny)
When passing the event horizon, it's expected. (Score:4, Funny)
At least they'd be able to say they worked closely together on the issue.
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Under the pressure of 47,000 consumed black holes, they will (disembodied) definitely come closer together as one entity, physically, and molecularly. As for the souls, who knows?
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Cthulhu!
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Bless you.
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Devour you [wikipedia.org]
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As for the souls, who knows?
Call it an exercise in metaphysics.
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Re:rest of sentence... They'll be back... (Score:1)
Intellectually, maybe. After all, they are ... "brighter than a thousand sons"....
And yet... (Score:5, Funny)
I did that too (Score:1)
lucky event (Score:1, Interesting)
Quote FTA:
"The use of the macro- and microlensing, coupled with the giant eye of the VLT, enabled astronomers to probe regions on scales as small as a millionth of an arcsecond. This corresponds to the size of a one euro coin seen at a distance of five million kilometres, i.e., about 13 times the distance to the Moon!"
A truly fortuitous occurence. How long before our technology can catch up to that level?
But can they put it back together again? (Score:1)
Was kinda hoping they'd opened its super-dense stomach to analyze what it'd been eating. "Frederic, clean up after yourself! You left black hole innards all over the scalpel."
Black hole autopsy (Score:4, Funny)
Scully Using a Very Large Scapel for Dissection? (Score:2)
Obviously an alien object autopsy like that calls for Gillian Anderson to do the dissection. The question is where they'd get a large enough scalpel to dissect a supermassive black hole?
Re:Scully Using a Very Large Scapel for Dissection (Score:5, Funny)
The question is where they'd get a large enough scalpel to dissect a supermassive black hole?
And yet sharp enough to dissect a singularity.
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On the otherside of the visible universe (Score:4, Interesting)
CSI Spinoff (Score:3, Funny)
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Hey, maybe they could bring in Natalie Portman as his borderline-lesbian-almost-love-interest. You know, the hot babe they bring in just for the sexual tension... ;)
Wow, that is some serious science. (Score:1, Funny)
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It's a Pinto that is so explosive that eventually it started imploding and collapse into itself.
Car Analogy. (Score:5, Funny)
It's sort of as if by combining a double natural 'magnifying glass' with the power of ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have scrutinized the inner parts of a car 10 billion light-years away. They were able to study the car with a level of detail a thousand times better than that of the best telescopes in the world, providing the first observational confirmation of the prevalent theoretical models of such cars.
Hope that helps!
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Other common dumbing-down... (Score:1)
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How many football fields away is that?
Lots. Like, a whole fucking lot.
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Can black hole massivity be measured in LoCs?
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Yo dawg I heard you like magnifying, so we put a gravitational lens in your gravitational lens.
Oh no :( (Score:1, Funny)
Those freakin' scientists...MICROLENSING the black hole! And a supermassive one at that. The audacity.
In fact, I can just hear it now:
ooh baby don't you know I suffer??
Those freakin' scientists (Score:3, Informative)
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When that's your name, you just have to become a scientist. Like a music teacher I used to know, Derek Tuba.
World's Largest (Score:2)
Universe's Largest Scalpel
Hey, that belongs... (Score:2)
... to the world's most giant doctor!
Question for Astronomers (Score:1)
I can assume that macrolensing only works as a magnification if you are not looking for things such as spatial detail, and are instead looking for general facts such as temperatures and wavelengths of light. But then I am assumming...
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The macrolensing and microlensing both work in the same way as standard lensing.
do you remember Huyghens Construction [tamuk.edu] showing how a change in the propagation (phase) velocity of a wave in one region compared to another region can lead to the laws of refraction and reflection of waves? And how this was used as evidence that the
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Of course, I suppose that it's possible that your school hasn't covered these topics yet ; if not, I'd suggest that you ask your parents for permission to get a science tutor, so that you can get up to speed on the basic knowledge necessary for a 14-year-old to get into senior school.
Of course the school hasn't taught this yet. Because to teach anything that would imply the earth is not the center of the universe and more than 8000 years old would be contrary to the teachings of God and must of course be wrong. Welcome to church controlled schooling.
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Maybe I was lucky in the schooling I received : the worst teacher for ramming religion down his charges throats (Chemistry, Dr. Blunt, I'm afraid) was totally ineffectual since he was trying to both teach chemistry (in which he had his PhD)
pft yeah right - 10 billion light years away (Score:1)
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Several responses to your post:
"...wait for 10 billion years...": no, whatever happened seems to have happened some 10 billion years _ago_.
"...convergence of fake radiation...": although the 10-billion-year-old events are still quite open to argument, the astronomers observed _real_ radiation from them.
"...fricken verifiable data closer to earth...": any slashdotter can tell you that you'll get your nearby black hole data just a few dozen milliseconds after the LHC starts working.
Oh c'mon.... (Score:1)
There's a joke... (Score:2)
...about asstronomers, Goatse and the large hardon collider (or harcon collider?) in there...
Who's first?
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O
If you can't tell, it's been split down the center and pulled apart.
I want Einstein's cross on a silver chain (Score:4, Interesting)
... seriously. This would be such a great accessory for the scientifically-minded. It's a nice, distinctive-looking piece of science [eso.org]. Wear it as an atheist as a statement about religion; wear it next to your christian cross as a non-atheist as a statement about rational spirituality. Whatever - I just think someone could make a nice piece of thoughtful jewelery out of this.
Still to prove... (Score:1)
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Yes. I think they're pretty much at the same redshift. This is however also expected from Arp's ideas though.
There should be other features as well, such as Lyman-alpha forests [wikipedia.org] usable in establishing the sameness of these objects. I don't know if these has/can be measured for these four objects though...
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I'm not that much for the ejection "crackpot" ideas ;-), they're amusing though. I haven't RTFA, but I wonder if there's anything in the measurement data indicating some orientation of the quasar output. Then it would be possible to perform the same measurements on the other three objects and check if the estimated orientation correlates. I guess it's not possible from these kinds of observations though.
Regarding the problem with correlating the four objects variable light - what might be the largest time d
Why an Einstein Cross? (Score:2)
Re:Why an Einstein Cross? (Score:4, Informative)
Some gravitational lensing configurations do, in fact, produce a ring [wikipedia.org]. As you might expect, though, such perfect alignment is pretty rare, and you usually get partial arcs or smeared out blobs.
I'm not knowledgeable about the exact reason for the cross configuration is, but the unusual effects of gravitational lensing are often due to the fact that the lens (a massive galaxy, in most cases) isn't a perfect point source, so the optical effects are somewhat surprising.
MUSE (Score:2)
LOL
I had Supermassive Black Hole playing in the background when I read this article summary.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xsp3_a-PMTw [youtube.com]
so....does this mean? (Score:1)
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Science doesn't "prove" anything and "beyond theory or any possible conjecture" implies something super-natural or divine but yes the existance of black holes has been accepted by science for several decades. You cannot please everyone so I am sure there are still a few who deny the existance of black holes due to the long tail of skepticisim [google.com.au]
Astronomers Dissect a Supermassive Black Hole (Score:2)
Astronomer: "Scalpel..."
*slurp*
Astronomer: "crap... another one please..."