Black Hole Emits a 1,000-Light-Year-Wide Gas Bubble 145
PhrostyMcByte writes "12 million light-years away, in the outer spiral of galaxy NGC 7793, a bubble of hot gas approximately 1,000 light-years in diameter can be found shooting out of a black hole — one of the most powerful jets of energy ever seen. (Abstract available at Nature.) The bubble has been growing for approximately 200,000 years, and is expanding at around 1,000,000 kilometers per hour."
Re:End of the world. (Score:3, Insightful)
Only if we happen to be in the path of the jet, its not a sphere you know. I'm not upping my life insurance policy.
Re:How can a black hole emit anything? (Score:3, Insightful)
Acting as if theories are somehow more than the current best guess(es) of the scientific method is throwing out the skepticism that is the core of said method.
Oh please, you're no better than the original poster. While you accuse the original poster of overstating the rigor of scientific theories, you massively understate it by bringing them down to the level of mere guesses. Of course, as always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but don't delude yourself into thinking that your position is at all superior to that of the OPs. You're simply taking the opposite end of the axis of credulity.
Re:In science (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing outside of pure logic is ever "proven right". Science is a process of observation, providing hypotheses with explain the observations and predict future observations in a manner which makes them falsifiable, attempting to falsify the hypotheses, and replacing or refining them when they conflict with observations.
We certainly have a very many clues, which are the vast array of observations that underlie the current theoretical model, both those that black hole theory was created to explain and those that have occurred since in the testing of the theory, the refinement of some parts of it, and the validation of others.
This is true of the nature of black holes in the exact same sense that it is true of the theories in the fields of materials science and fluid mechanics that are used in building planes. We have masses of observations, we have a model which we can and have used successfully to predict results that weren't used in coming up with the model, but we have no way -- as with everything in the physical universe -- of directly "knowing" the underlying truth, only making observations and hypothesizing relations between them and testing those hypotheses.
Re:How can a black hole emit anything? (Score:2, Insightful)
You see, an epistemological assumption that we can never know truth comes either from a limitation of human conscience or from an ontological assumption that there is no truth to be found.
In reality, there is a reality, there is truth, we are simply constrained by our human limitations when it comes to interpreting it.
If you read what I said I didn't argue that pure falsifiability can be obtained any more than the pure utility of a theory can be obtained; simply that these are theoretical anchor points on which the continuum of theory lies.
Remember: objective, not subjective, Bayesian inferences are what have brought us to the spam filters, etc.