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Space Science

Hubble Delivers Indications Of Black Holes 124

Posted by timothy from the if-you-think-your-/job/-sucks dept.
tomorama writes: "Working with the Hubble Space telescope, Ohio State University astronomers studied the most central 1000 light years -- or 6 quadrillion miles -- of 24 spiral galaxies. Associate Professor Richard Pogge and graduate student Paul Martini discovered a distinct swirling pattern in 20 of the 24 galaxies, indicating that huge masses of dust were being sucked into gigantic black holes." The link is worth visiting for the enhanced photo of a black hole at feeding time alone.
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Hubble Delivers Indications Of Black Holes More

Hubble Delivers Indications Of Black Holes

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  • But don't use that Hubble photo in Church. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    From the Hubble web site:

    "Inappropriate use of images includes but is not limited to: religious materials, e.g., tracts, handouts, etc., gang related materials, ethnic background materials, and political information."

    Despite what you might think, Hubble data is propietary data belong to some sham front organization. It's NASA SOP to violate copyright law which says that works of the US Federal Government are in the Public Domain. Duh. The Public pays for it - the Public gets to use it. But no. Many US agency farm off all their important work to some private organization or company which we pay AND allow to claim copyright.

    In the case of Hubble, the main motivation for this scam is so they can legally give the "principle investigators" EXCLUSIVE USE of the data for a year or so as a "prize" for having won the competition for being involved. As a side-benefit, they can forbid religious and other unsavoury charactors from using the data at all.

    In another case which should be familiar, many of the Linux kernel's NIC drivers were developed by someone doing work for NASA on NASA computers at NASA facilities (and distributed from those same computers) which "should" result in them being in the Public Domain for use by Linux, *BSD, BeOS, etc., but no - they are proprietary like the rest of the kernel so that when someone tried to use them in a non-GPLed OS they were threatened with a law suit.

    I'm never quite sure whether my wrath should be directed only at the government agencies that create these loopholes in the system or those who, like Bill Gates and Donald Becker, take advantage of them. My instinct is to blame them all for not doing "the right thing" despite the loopholes.

  • Re:I stopped reading after... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    He said:
    this kind of research is simply of no use to us

    You said:
    Don't speak for others who have not invited you to speak for them, asshole.

    I say:
    Maybe I want him to speak for me? This is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. You're upset because he says "us" which you automatically assumes includes you. Then you come back around to say "don't speak for others who have not invited you to speak for them". Yet this is you speaking for other people, telling him not to speak for them.

    Well this is hardly fair is it? Next time, why don't you say something like:

    Hi, I'm dumb and I don't want you to express your opinions! Thanks, I'll go back to molesting children now,

    Because it's honest and fair, much more so than what you said before.

  • Re:When? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    When they get that Flux Capacitor running and a better looking car than the Delorean, I recommend the Subaru Impreza RS.
  • (From the album: A Farwell to Kings)
    Book One ---- The Voyage

    Prologue
    In the constellation of Cygnus
    There lurks a mysterious, invisible force
    The Black Hole
    Of Cygnus X-1
    Six Stars of the Northern Cross
    In mourning for their sister's loss
    In a final flash of glory
    Nevermore to grace the night....

    1
    Invisible
    To telescopic eye
    Infinity
    The star that would not die
    All who dare
    To cross her course
    Are swallowed by
    A fearsome force
    Through the void
    To be destroyed
    Or is there something more?
    Atomized ---- at the core
    Or through the Astral Door ----
    To soar....

  • Thank you.

    I am sick and tired of reading "scientists have discovered..." or "scientists now know that...". Individual people (sometimes working together, somtimes alone) make discoveries, not "scientists"!

    RICHARD POGGE and PAUL MARTINI.

  • Bullshit. What are you going to do, hop in your space ship, fly out there, and check if it's really a black hole? Something like this can't be "proven", even if you have access to all their data.

    So, you can't prove it--in some sense you can verify it.

    Black holes were postulated many years ago. Various folk (Thorne, Hawking, etc.) then went and said, "well, if there's a black hole, we take our existing physics, and we predict that such and such happens."

    Each time later evidence confirms a prediction made from extrapolation of earlier theories, you develop more evidence for that theory. At some point there becomes a consensus that the theory is right, or at least a good approximation. For example, if you'd asked someone in 1900 how things accelerate under gravity you would have heard a theory that was wrong (relativistic effects not having been suggested) but which was correct for practical purposes.

    Black holes (if they exist) would have a very distinct effect on the matter surrounding them. For example, it gets accelerated quickly enough towards the black hole to emit certain types of radiation.

    What's cool about science is you do the experiement yourself. Someone can get time on the Hubble, point it in the same direction, and see the same things. Screw using the same data, if you used Pons & Fleischman's data you would have seen cold fusion, but the fact that most people haven't been able to replicate those experiments makes most people doubtful of their validity.

    --j



  • Many years ago, I read in a scientific journal that there was/were some people talking about "White Holes" - the opposite of black holes.

    IIRC, there was some talk about the relationship between cosmic string and "White Holes". Personally I find it interesting.

    I wonder if there is any development on the "White Hole" front? Has anyone prove the existence of "White Holes"?

    Expiring mind is waiting, and waiting, and waiting for the answer - if there ever any.

    :)

  • A smallish black hole (a few solar masses or less)
    will have the behavior you claim- ripping things
    apart frm the tremendous gravitational gradient
    (tide) over the size of a nearby object.
    However a very massive hole- on the order of billions solar masses would appear moe benign.
    The tidal force would be barely noticeable.
    When you crossed the horizon, your any radio (EM)
    messages to the outside universe would stop making it out.

    People have written sci-fi stories about these
    closed universes.
  • A swirling pattern seems oddly two-dimensional for a black hole, which I would think pulls in mattter from every direction. Even weirder, the pattern reminds me of the black hole as whirlpool in the 1979 Disney movie "The Black Hole." (Check out this picture from the film [sunet.se])

  • My life online is a whole lot more interesting than my real life (and takes up more of my time)
  • Remember, advertising is a way to make money, by posting(or following a link to) an msnbc URL, you are making Microsoft some money. Maybe you don't care, I just wanted to point it out.


    =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

  • Re: The spiraling dust

    The dust would orbit the black hole in an accretion disk (I know I've mispelled accretion-sorry)

    You're right that the dust ought to fall into the black hole from a spherical cloud of dust, all things being equal.

    But Black Holes rotate, and rotating they grab space-time and drag it with them. Short version- in the presence of a rotating black hole, the tidal forces caused by the rotation force the particles into a disk symmetry rather than a shell symmetry. (Much like the rings of Saturn are rings because of the planet's shape.)

  • One of the common ideas about 20 years ago was that the matter being sucked into the blackhole was ejected somewhere else - the "whitehole" that was connected to the blackhole by a "tunnel" in the spacetime continuim.

    For a long while Quasers were thought to be the most likely candidates for "whiteholes" but they are now thought to be primordial galactic cores- perhaps a view of a very young super blackhole.

    The idea of a white hole being linked to a blackhole is still played around with in the "wormhole" effect- which is seen so impressively in Star Trek DS9 - grin. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever definitely seen evidence of a wormhole.

    Not that they would be any fun, even if they do exist. The tidal forces as you get close to them would rip apart any sort of macroscopically sized object.

  • also, they won't serve the page unless you accept cookies. grr.
  • Maybe you're boycotting. Most others really don't care.

  • Actually, it's a normal part of academic (and scientific) discourse to remove personal referents and so on. While you may quote (Hawking 42), you don't say "I found this . . . " you say "it has been found that". And often there are multiple people looking for the same thing, working as a team, so they write it together.

    That is your first (bad) lesson on academic and scientific discourse. Thank you.
  • Hi, I'm dumb and I don't want you to express your opinions! Thanks, I'll go back to molesting children now,

    You're sharp... ... How about him saying is simply of no use for me (him)? How about you speaking for yourself?

    Yet this is you speaking for other people, telling him not to speak for them.

    No. I'm speaking for myself.

    Though truly you're right I should have said Do not speak for me asshole.

    Thank you.
  • We should concentrate more on things which have prac

    Remember the Marshall Tucker? That car had all the safety gadgets you could imagine. Course nobody thought any of those things were practical. Not until 20 yrs later. So put a sock in it.

    this kind of research is simply of no use to us

    Don't speak for others who have not invited you to speak for them, asshole.

    public utilities, the military and education

    There's no way for the education system to improve, if science in itself is not considered important. Everything you use in your daily existence is the result of a technology that was once considered useless. For example, your military expense should not include war planes because they were once considered useless. I forget the quote (sometime in the early 30s).

    I'm sorry but ignorant assholes like you are the reason society is stuck in a confused frustrated state. You rant all about the future and education but when it comes time to invent or discover or simply follow a dream (you don't think following dreams is a useful endeavor it seems), you whine about public utilities as if your toilet were more important than progress.

    Go fuck yourself.
  • Ok hate is a strong word. More like I'm inconvenienced to the point of insanity. But this one is great. Oh and for those fools whining about modding up/down those you do/don't agree with, show us where to draw the line oh great masters of all that is and isn't.
  • What application is going to come from research into vibrations, statistics?

    Computers, cell phones... space age technology has produced materials that are resitant to wear and tear because the gravitational pull no longer has such deleterious effect on their atomic structure.

    When you need nanosecond timing precision it gets very annoying to work with earth built objects.

    Blach holes? Intergalactic power sources for travel. If we can travel across oceans why not space? Before posting next time, please try to clamp down on your irrational urges to post idiotic reponses to something according to your loosely abstracted beliefs.

    I repeat, go fuck yourself.

    None, that's what. That's why I called it pointless research - because it is pointless.

    You're certifiable. Now why the fuck would anyone do research if they already knew what something was good for. Integration and devlopment comes after research, fuckhead.

  • It doesn't look like Nasa has a press release out for this one yet. Well, at least I can't find one on the page you quote. (Thanks none-the-less, now I have an afternoon's catching up to do :)

    Providing convenient links to external sources of information is one thing that some news-sites are good at, and some are really bad at. There is one way down at the bottom of the MSNBC story that goes to a press releas from the researchers themselves (at Ohio State [ohio-state.edu]) that has slightly better images, but I had to hunt for the links and know what I was looking for.

    I give MSNBC a 4 out of 10. A couple points for having links at all, a couple points for having more than one link, but no points for visibility or integration with the story, and I'm deducting a point because they never ever have click-throughs to decent sized images.

  • Religion is overrated. It is all blind faith and stuff. Look at the facts! Science is based on the facts and the truth. Religion is like peoples big conspiracy theory about the universe.

    There is this huge unknown force that guides all of our lives, but never shows its face? Maybe God (if he exists) did make all of this and then sat back in his hammock with a beer and just watched us fuck around.

    Another thing...how can you be so ignorant as to think that we are the only planet in the UNIVERSE to host intelligent life?? Do you KNOW how many planets there are out there? So what are the odds that a planet in the universe will host life? One in a hundred billion? Make a random number generator that takes a number out of a hundred billion and see how often the number 1 comes up. Eventually there have to be more planets than Earth that host life.

    NASA is not"state sponsored aetheism" aimed at destabilizing religion. They don't care about all the religious people running around with their thumbs up their butts complaining about the separation between church and state. They want to keep the russians and japanese down with technology so that the US will always be the police of the world. If you have read this whole thing, I am impressed. :)
  • wait. science is not anti-God. one cannot say that something always existed because it had to be created sometime. Of course, this is based on a human concept of Time, which may not be how the universe works. interesting idea, huh?

    i don't know if i believe in God, but I suppose that as far as i can comprehend, all the matter in the universe had to originate from somewhere, and God is a good answer for that. but where did God come from? is God a being made of matter or is he pure energy? or is he a spirit? i have no clue.

    what i do know is that black holes are interesting and can be helpful in charting the history of the universe and in revealing the secrets therein.
  • Why don't you design your own personal Hubble telescope and launch it from your roof? That will show those damn geeky rocket scientists and genius physicists who attended MIT and such. Then send your HIGH RES photos to NASA anonymously with a link to Slashdot.They're doing their best, in 20 years we will have much better stuff. Hell, we will probably be living on Mars by then.
  • On the "Hubble delivers black holes" article, Set you browser to ask to accept cookies and try to follow the slashdot link. All you will get is two cookies trying to load from MicroSluts nbc website. If you accept the cookies of course you get thru. "Forcing you to accept cookies?" Where are my rights to refuse? Is this the future of cookies? Yes I want my cake and eat it too! I think this has gone way too far and actually no one has mentioned it. There were at least 114 replys to the article at the time I read it. Are we all sheep?
  • IMNAAstrophysicist, but I'll try to help. First, accretion disks are a fact of life, you're going to have to accept it sooner or later. 1. Orbits are eliptical 2. Any sufficient collection of random orbits will have at least one cluster of similar orbits. 3. Given time and gravitational contraction, initial biases are amplified by ejection, capture , and attraction to other objects in orbit. Second, the paragraph you mention is talking about "active" black holes as being those which are attracting enough matter for their activities to be visible from earth. Specificly, Black holes around which most stuff is safely orbiting form simple disks which won't stand out to clearly from here. Black holes which are actually swallowing large amounts of stuff will most likely exhibit the spiral patterns in their disks which the whole article is basically about. In the context or the article and paragraph, active and inactive make perfect sense.
  • Stephen Hawking predicts that black holes _emit_ radiation (and therefore mass, ie matter).

    Thus, in an open universe, the matter falling into black holes will eventually pop right back out. So, you don't really have to worry about this too much.

  • Black hole emit radiation. Or so Stephen Hawking thinks, but I'm pretty sure he's right. So, the amount of energy available for life may fluctuate, but it will never be zero.

    The _real_ problem is that you will eventually have a completely uniform universe, (maximum entropy) which means that there isn't a way to harness that energy.

    On another note, it is interesting to note that we may already be in a black hole. If you look at the average mass density and size of the observable universe (which is about 10 or 15 billion light years in radius) and plug them into an appropriate formula (say here [treasure-troves.com]) then the universe has the gross properties of a black hole (the right size and mass). (It's important to note that size or mass completely describes a non-charged, non-spinning black hole).

    So, falling into a black hole might suck (pardon the pun :] ) but living in one might be ok.

  • I'm a Christian, and I believe in God. I'm also very interested in scientific things. I "believe in" Black holes, and I think worm holes may well be possible, although that still needs to have a bit more research put into it. I also, although again same comments as with worm holes, think time travel may well be possible. I dont seem to see any huge major contradictions in any of those things. I don't belive in evolution, but then, that's a pretty mixed bag as far as people who believe it and don't believe it. But as far as the other stuff goes, I don't find any problems with being a Christian and believing in God, and at the same time accepting stuff like Black Holes and the possibilty of Worm Holes and other such things. So, to address both sides of the arguement to the "religious" side: Why does everyone always assume most of science can't be true because of religious beliefs? to the "science" side: Not all religious people are, excuse the term, morons, who think that most of science can't be true because of other beliefs. There do exist people who, while believing in something, such as God, can also accept life as a reality and deal with things in it as such. So don't just get a negative view of a group because of a few people.
  • >>> Another thing...how can you be so ignorant as to think that we are the only planet in the UNIVERSE to host intelligent life?? Do you KNOW how many planets there are out there? So what are the odds that a planet in the universe will host life? One in a hundred billion? Make a random number generator that takes a number out of a hundred billion and see how often the number 1 comes up. Eventually there have to be more planets than Earth that host life. If one accepts a purely scientific view of the universe, then yes, there absolutely must be life on other planets, it would be stupid to think otherwise. but from a religious point of view, lets say you take a plain cookie. lets say you take 100 billion plain cookies. lets say you put frosting on top of one of them. how many cookies have frosting on them? one, obviously, because that was the only one you put frosting on. obviously if you randomly went through every cookie store and got 100 billion cookies, you would be stupid to think you would only get 1 with frosting on them. but if it's a designed thing (you putting frosting on one), then obviously that's all there's going to be. I'm not saying there isn't life on other planets, I don't know anywhere in the Bible where it specifically says "there is only life on this planet", just, from a religious point of view, that's how it could be. and as far as "blind faith" goes, sure, the better part of any religion is "blind faith". but lets look at the universe from a scientific point of view. "how was the universe formed?" "Big Bang, an explosion of an immense amount of matter that heated up and exploded" (or whatever the exact way that goes). "Well, where did all that matter come from?" "It was just always there". So even in science one runs into numerous cases of "blind faith". I'm not saying that "disproves science", just that religion isnt the only thing with "blind faith"

  • At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC

    :)
    ========================
    63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
    ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
  • You're right. That link used to be part of a rather large series of pics. But from there I know that you can find quite an extensive and fun number of very spiffy pics.

    hehe... time to weed through my bookmarks...
  • ... which of course I can't view on my Linux box because WMP for Unix has been discontinued. (Another reason why Microsoft wanted to invest with NBC? :-)
  • There is no such thing as gravity. Everything sucks.

  • The link to the book on amazon is here

    Aren't we supposed to be boycotting [gnu.org] Amazon.com in favor of Barnes & Noble [bn.com]?

  • {On Topic Black Holes}

    One step closer to a universal garbage chute. :)
    Seriously folks, have you ever thought of the practical implications of blackholes or derived "physical anomalies"?
    Bins that don't need to be emptied or radioactive waste dumps that don't release radiation to the area surrounding them.

    Or a "reversable" black hole.
    Put "infinite stuff" in, reverse and return on demand, sort of a flip-flop black/white hole.
    Is it theoretically possible to focus a wormholes start and stop points to the same physical point in space/time?

    Is it be theoretically possible (permitting we could get to a black hole) that an anti-gravity enclosure field could protect the contents from being compressed by a black hole, or does a white hole uncompress the output (presuming there is output) in a like manner and restore the object passing through to it's original state, therefore eliminating the safety measure?
    Sort of like a cosmic tar-gzip/untar-gunzip. :)

    {Now on to bending the topic}

    Can any christians/jews/muslems/whathaveyou speculate on what a supreme being might want with black holes?
    Are we a simple bacterium on the skin of said supreme being looking at pores in his/hers epidermis?
    This would explain (in a somewhat twisted fashion) the theory of spacial surface tension.

    {Now on to rant}

    Why does finding black holes mean that scientists are trying to debunk religion?
    You all seem to forget that we cannot "prove" anything about this universe once it leaves the realm of "hands-on".
    We can speculate, postulate and hypothesise until we're blue in the face, and while we can get some great results (computers, cars, television and radio to name but a few), we also cannot disprove anything.

    I cannot prove that god exists, but because I cannot find evidence to disprove him/her/it I therefore must at least acknowledge that there is room in this universe for him/her/it.
    Theoretically I cannot disprove anything.
    If I were to say that atoms spin in oblong orbits and have names like Bob or Paul, I cannot say I am right just because it's written down, nor can you say I'm wrong because there is no disproving evidence of such. :) Makes you think doesn't it.
    Are we living on a planet in the orbit of a nucleus of an atom in a caffeine molecule in someone's giant coffe cup, and if we look harder at atoms, will we find infinitely small galaxies inside those atoms?
    Does infinity exist and if so, is it a sort of pale blue?

    It has been said that god created man, but speculated that man created god and suppose both are right.
    We know not enough to say who is wrong and who is right.
    We only know ourselves and our place in our own microcosm's, and while occasionally your microcosm may intersect along mine at some point in time (and for that matter what is time?) we cannot say what the consequences may be, we can only deal with the good and the bad and live our lives as best we can.

    Thank you and good night/morning.

    Zero Kelvin - mailto:zero@neuron.cjb.net
    Web site - http://neuron.cjb.net
    (I know, I know, the update is coming.)

  • Slightly offtopic

    The more I hear about supermassive black holes being found in the centres of galaxies, the more I am reminded of Larry Niven's "Known Space" series. Rather than the threat posed by radation from supernovae in the galaxy core postulated by Niven, it seems rather to be astronomical /dev/null threat.

    The real question is: do they burp when they're done?
  • >Earth is still alive because it has the energy >inside it to survive etc. Once it exhausts its >life energy it will collapse into a star and >everntually (and I mean after billions of years) >turn into a black hole.) I'm afraid that's wrong. A star has to have => Chandekshlar's limit ,a HUGE mass that is many many orders of magnitude greater than the mass of the Sun to eventually become a black hole. Few stars have such a humongous mass. Most (like the Sun) will become Red Giants or such. Try reading Steven Hawking's book "A Brief History of Time". It's pretty good fare. Z.
  • What do you mean, you don't see any proof? You can't expect to 'see' a black hole any more than you can expect to 'see' quarks or electrons or vector bosons, leptons, gravitons, et al. You must believe in them (Please tell me you believe they exist. Or if you have another theory, I'd like to hear of it.) We know they exist because experiments tell us they must. In the case of black holes, we observe that gas clouds are being drawn towards something for no apparent reason. Yet a reason must exist. Thus we postulate that it must be a black hole.
  • First of all, I'm not the one who brought religion into this debate, which is completely unnecessary and offtopic. However, since we're at the name calling stage now I feel the need to reply.

    I note you referred to me as arrogant, but you are the arrogant one; I don't try to push my views on you while you are insisting I believe in God. I told the guy to go away because his post IS offtopic and I hate pious people who insist on spouting their rhetoric whenever they get the chance. I didn't use the Black Hole article as a chance to further advance my atheist cause, and I still don't see what the guy's point is...does not seem logical to think that Black Hole's could not exist if God does, they are not mutually exclusive.

    In conclusion, go away and worship God and you can sit in heaven while us unbelievers burn in the pits of hell forever! I think that's a fair agreement, don't you?
  • Go away and worship your precious God, I could care less, but I don't want to hear about it in relation to a story about black holes. Someone moderate that post down as offtopic...
  • First off, I don't understand the sprialing dust theory.. They almost make it sound like black holes are a point on a 2D plane which makes no sense, this dust would have to be collapsing towards the centre, but I doubt it would spiral down as you'd have a sphere of such dust rather than a cone or disk of it like they tend to describe.

    Also, what is this crap about a black hole being "inactive" unless initially fed.. I'm sure MSNBC screwed up the wording here, but it sounds like they're describing a chemical reaction between two reacting chemicals; without one there is no reaction. This is crap, black holes are massive gravitational fields and would accellerate matter towards the centre all the time. I can see where after some time the process would stabilize; the matter near the hole would be inside and the matter far enough away would be attracted to nearer bodies. I'm not so sure where the "Before black holes become active, you have to feed them" quote would come from, it sounds misquoted or at worst pulled out of context. Who says the media cares if they get the story *right* anyway. I hope the scientists contact MSNBC about that, but not like they'll care.

    I expect too much...
  • There's a fluffy book review on the front page of the Toronto Star [thestar.ca] today.

    The link to the book on amazon is here [amazon.com]

    The article might not be very well written, but it raises some interesting ideas and guesses as to whether we're alone or not. Not completly on-topic, but what the hell...
  • "...everyone on here is foaming at the mouth to shout the reasons why science is right and religion is wrong."

    Huh? Am I missing something? You're the one who brought up religion in this article.

    --
  • Absolutely! The No Such Agency could've used all that money to find even more ingenious ways to invade citizens privacy. Now THERE's a cause that can have an "impact on the lives of ordinary Americans"!
    Or maybe they could've appropriated the money to the Presidential Cover-up Fund.
    Oh, I almost forgot, they could've used the money to overstep their bounds and subpena(sp?) people in other countries who try to keep the megacorporations from controlling the world.

    Yes, using money to better understand the most basic structures of the universe is truely a worthless cause.

    --
  • But then again Microsoft would probably buy out NASA and patent the photos as proprietary source code

    Let's hope not, before you know it will only be possible to travel trough time in a spaceship running MS Windows 3122 TSE ( TimeShip edition )

    aed
  • Einstein's original research into relativity was obscure and still has not provided much benefit to humanity. Relativity is a very presice tool for measuring gravitation, but for such applications as the Moon shot, normal Newtonian calculations were used, as they were simpler and precise enough for the job at hand.

    However . . . Einstein's work led directly to the development of another field called Quantum Mechanics. Simply put, someone was trying to calculate the energy coming off a hot body using the theory of Relativity and determined that it was radiating energy at an infinite rate. To avoid this obviously absurd result, energy was deemed to require an individual unit of measure, called a quanta.

    Quantum mechanics is now proven a valid theory three hundred and fifty million times a second in the confines of the box of my PC. EVERY transistor and semiconductor on the planet bows to the rules of Quantum mechanics. So much for useless scientific research. If you find all of this to be a big waste of time, go check into your nearest cave and spend some time re-learning how to bang the rocks together, 'cause you obviously aren't fit to enjoy the benefits of advanced science and its applications towards technology.
  • You couldn't have possibly said something less correct than if you had just lied. 'Western science is a direct result of Christianity.' Do not make me laugh. Western science has advanced *at every turn* against the will and whim of the Christian religion.

    Every single advancement in science, be it in the area of physics, astronomy, or biology, has been violently attacked by Christians. Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, all did their work against the will of the church. Later it was Darwin, then Einstein. All of these major contributors to science were assaulted for their views by bearers of the Bible.

    The roots of Christian philosophy in fact derive partly from Platonism, a school of thought in which mystical "ideal realms" and "perfect shapes" were more important than real realms and real shapes. Part of the reason they call irrational numbers irrational was due to the prejudice by Platonists that all numbers be whole and perfect and evenly divisible. While Platonism was gaining its groundswell in Greek thought, other and more valid approches to science, including those of Sun-centered astronomer Democritus were suppressed and ridiculed.

    Plato, and his buddy Aristotle, it turns out, were completely wrong about almost every subject of science they chose to take a position on. But it was Platonic philosophy and Aristotelian science that formed the basis of much of the corpus of Christian thought. Aristotle's absurd constructs of invisible spheres took up prominence as the approved model of the universe, and Plato's republic (a repulsive, obnoxious and idiotic piece of work) became the model for an ideal society. What rot.
  • You can prove that xrays exist by postulating the effect they will have on a photographic plate of film. I've got a picture of my teeth made with x-rays, in fact. You can prove that DNA exists by using tools to analyze it. And I don't just open my mouth and swallow, like it's a religion. I own a telescope. I watched comet chunks hit Jupiter. I have seen the rings of Saturn for myself. I've looked at dinosaur fossils embedded in the rock. And I believe that nuclear forces exist because of a little thing called an atom bomb.

    What really floors me is this: you can't see electrons. But they're running your computer. For that matter, you cannot see the registers of your processor. As a programmer, I know these things exist, even if I can't describe to you physically what they look like. But I'll tell you the technology based on these invisible things WORKS EVERY TIME.

    Another thing that I use to examine whether or not what I'm hearing is true is simple logic. If a logical proposition forces me to assume too many things that can't be proved, I discard it. Little trick called Occam's Razor.

    God is a terrible theory. There are no consequences to the God theory that can be examined in real life. No footprints, loose fibers, or blood samples have been offered. There is no experiment to perform. God hasn't personally come down from wherever and spoken to me. And I don't think he's spoken to anyone else either.

    Your conclusion that there is a plan shows you have an active imagination but not too much in the way of critical thinking. When I see the diversity of life and the intricacy and beauty of things I see four billion years of random events. Having sat and watched some few minutes or hours of random events, extrapolating from my incredibly tiny time window to four billion years is not very difficult.

    'Just because we are not privy to this plan does not mean it doesn't exist.' Let's get the logical idiocy out of the way right now. There is NO REASON to believe in a plan. The entire structure and history of the universe can be explained as happenstance obeying the limitations of the physical laws of the universe. It may be a displeasing explanation for you, but it has one benefit over the God theory in that all the postulates of the theory are within observation We know gravity is real. Drop a pin. Duh. We know the strong and weak nuclear forces worked (we've had some experience with them in the form of atom bombs, you know) and we know that electromagnetism works. Again, without it your computer would just be a lump of sand. Those four fundamental forces can be used to trace the evolution of the universe backwards to within a fraction of a second of the instant of creation. They do so remarkably well, despite the fact that we have no pictures or records of the event. Simply put, the universe wouldn't behave as it does if events had happened differently. Sure some new phenomenon may come along and prove it all wrong -- that's what science thrives on. Newer evidence is always the most correct evidence. It's part of not making a judgement call about that which you do not know for sure.

    If you ask, what was before the universe, I will say I do not know. If you tell me God must have made it, my very first question is going to be, WHO MADE GOD AND WHY? It's an important question. And it's the same question you would ask me. What is the first cause of it all? Why complicate the issue with an invisible being whose existence cannot be proven?

    To get to the second, and asthetic part of my answer: Why does there have to be a plan? Is it bothering you that there may not be a reason for your existence? That you may be born, live out your life, and die, and at the end of it it was just the processing of groceries into sewage. I'd have to say that's probably what bothers people more than the scientific issues (which you've clearly shown you don't grasp). It's the meaning of it all that people want. Well I make my own meaning. I don't require some being to direct my life. I'm an adult and can direct it myself. I don't need some preacher's 'guidance' to know who and what I am.

    And I think that's the problem. You want someone to be in charge. It scares the shit out of you that you may actually have to answer for your own actions. But I have to ask you if you would rather be a sock puppet. Is that what you really want?

    Tell you what. I know I can find in the archives of my home library, or the internet, proof (or disproof) for whatever scientific phenomenon you choose. It may require some effort on your part to check it out. It may require several years to understand the concepts involved. Science is hard work. If you don't want to make the effort to demonstrate yourself, do not get involved in the conversation.

    If you can find a convincing proof (or even compelling logic) for the existence of a divine plan, by all means email it to me. I would be most fascinated to examine such a construct. And I promise you, I'll tear it to ribbons. I'm that sure of myself. Thirty years of constant assaults have failed to convert me to Christianity. It's not for want of trying, I'll tell you that.
  • So you'd rather believe in something you can't see, touch, or feel but comforts you, than in something you can prove definitively. I realize the world according to science may be less inviting than the comic-book fantasy of a universe created solely as a stage upon which to enact a morality play. At the end of the play, of course, you get to go offstage and everything is A-OK. It would be a drag if all this stuff was real and deadly serious.

    I find it also amusing that you won't 'accept' a science that disproves articles of your faith. Reality won't budge, pal. The church wouldn't 'accept' Galileo. But for under $100 you can buy a telescope or pair of binoculars and point 'em at Jupiter. Those four satellites are still there, disproving the Church's stance that all objects must revolve around the earth. It took the Catholic church almost 400 years to officially 'accept' what any child could see with his own two eyes. I don't see that as something admirable. I see it as blind ignorance and prejudice.

    Science is the art of thinking for yourself. Fundamentally, I live by the premise that not one other human being on the face of the planet is more qualified than I to judge what is real. I refuse all arguments from authority. And it's surprising how often I can prove myself to be right.

  • Science is a description of known observed quantities in the universe. Statements of scientific fact include "The sky is blue" or "The earth is round." Galileo stated that the earth was not stationary and not the center of the universe. This was held to be in contradiction to officially recieved doctrine of the church. Guess who was right?

    Religion is the sum of humanity's attempt to answer questions without prior knowledge of the subjects upon which they speak. Every time a new scientific discovery is made, it paves roads into that realm of unknown. Religion gets all huffy about it and claims blasphemy is occuring.

    Within one or two generations, the blasphemy is accepted by the majority of society as simple fact, and the area of discourse which religion owns is eroded. This erosion will continue until 1. Civilization destroys itself or 2. Religion's territory is so reduced that it can only claim knowledge through faith of areas that are either impossible to reach or so unimportant that the exploration isn't worth the trouble.

    In other words, I expect that given the current rate of humanity's expansion of knowledge that religion will become a nonsignificant side issue within at most another 500 years. The fact that it almost already has done so continues to escape most apologists. Areas of knowledge that were the purview of mystery a mere hundred years ago are now solid verifiable fact. We know the age of the universe. We have a good estimate of its size. We have a consise physical description of its origin that appears to match very closely observed reality. We can extrapolate from that knowledge to manipulate the universe on scales large and small that were unimaginable even 100 years ago.

    What you believe of the universe is irrelevant. It does not need you to exist in exactly the fashion that it has always existed. Your beliefs exist inside your head. They do not shape the universe. They do not control the evolution of its destiny. If your beliefs are such that you think the universe's laws do not apply to you, it will be a rude shock to YOU not to the universe when events do not bend themselves to your perceptions. To that, all I can say is, 'it's evolution in action.'

  • 'I suggest you study some history.' I have. Try the following titles:
    The Republic, Plato
    ?Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein. (I don't have the title offhand-- it's E's 'popular' book, about 150pp in length, on the subject but it's the best one I read of the three or four that I did).
    The Starry Messenger, Galileo Galilei.
    ?Dialog on Two Systems, Galileo Galilei. Title may vary depending on the translation.
    A Brief History Of Time, Stephen Hawking.
    Cosmos, Carl Sagan. (TV show or book, doesn't matter).
    Broca's Brain, Carl Sagan.
    The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg.

    To answer all but your adhominem attacks. Plato's 'ideal realm' was the apparent basis for the ridiculous Aristotelian 'spheres' which caused Galileo so much trouble, and continued to beleaguer scientists throughout the Renaissance. Basically, the heavens were thought to be perfect and any evidence to the contrary was vehemently denied and suppressed. Blemishes on the surface of the Moon were dismissed as an optical illusion. Read Galileo's Dialogs for the complete story.

    Plato's republic and the metaphors contained therein crop up everywhere in the succeeding medieval period as a basis for serfdom and slavery. Sagan I believe says in Cosmos that the ideas of the Platonists formed the basis for a 'corrupt social order.' A little research would bear that out. That and the stupid cave metaphor are the primary reasons I object to Plato.

    None of the scientific fields in question were, as far as I am aware, created by Christians. Einstein was a Jew, as you might recall. I think Darwin was an agnostic of some sort. Astronomy was invented centuries before the Bible was written, and as you may note neither the names of the stars nor the planets bear any 'Christian' derivation. Stars are by and large named in Arabic. Thus the Arabs probably contributed the most to the field of astronomy pre-Galileo. The pre-Galileo planets all have Roman names. Mathematics -- again I believe we call the numerals 0 through 9 the 'Arabic' numerals, not the 'Hebrew' numerals.

    Plenty of Christians advance the cause of science. I don't belittle their contributions. Newton was a devout Christian. But most of the time they do so at the protests of their church. In addition to the persecution of Galileo, and the List of Bad Books (or whatever) maintained by the Catholic Church, we have a more modern example: Not too long ago Hawking reports (see Brief History of Time) that the Pope lectured a bunch of physicists on how it was OK for them to talk about the Big Bang, but the period preceding it was verboten. Hawking of course confessed that he had been thinking about just that the day before . . .

    And the whole basis of Science is to learn about the universe. Whether it was created by anyone is not yours to say. You don't know that and can't prove it. And as I've posted before, God is a non-logical premise that Occam's Razor suggests we omit for reasons of simplicity. In short (or not), I believe the universe makes exactly as much sense without God as with. And since God doesn't make much sense to me, can't be proven, and adds no benefit to my understanding of the universe, and was to all appearances introduced to the equations by HUMAN BEINGS who didn't know any better than I do, I omit the whole idea from my equations.

    I would invite you to read my lifetime catalog of 4,000 books before you determine the 'quasi' and 'immature' states you believe I occupy. The titles above are the tip of the iceberg, friend. Also try: 'Paradise Lost,' by Milton, ' Dante's 'Inferno,' anything by the Bard, Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings,' Stephen King's 'The Dark Tower' series, and (to get to the stuff I really like) anything by Asimov, anything by Brian Aldiss, anything at all by Terry Bisson, Larry Niven, Stephen R. Donaldson, Vernor Vinge, MJ Engh, some selected Orson Scott Card (i thought Speaker for the Dead was his best ever), and so on, and so on, and so on . . .

  • In fact, Hawking radiation is created by the matter orbiting/spiraling towards the black hole. Imagine you're on your way to a black hole. When you reach its vicinity, you can go into orbit around it; if your orbit is unstable, you will spiral in towards the black hole. This will take a long time; but as you spiral in, your (angular) velocity will increase. Now, since you are made up of particles, all of whose angular velocities are increasing (read: all of which are accelerating), you will emit electromagnetic radiation. Someone beyond the gravitational pull of the black hole can intercept this radiation and realize that you are about to fall into it. Thus, a black hole *does* "emit" matter/energy.
  • Have you ever compared the properties of a black hole to, for example, the sun, our dwarf star? What keeps a planet from floating apart? Scientists say that a planet's mass creates a gravity field. It somehow keeps us white people from jumping higher than everyone else in basketball. Just a little harmless joke on the white men can't jump movie. Crappy movie though... I think that every planet has a very weak black hole in the center. It has fooled us for hundreds of years and it took an open-minded man to discover gravity. Do you think that there can be gravity if our planet was flat or was in the shape of a rectangle? I don't necessarily think that there is a possibility of a black hole in the center of our planet, but there may be strange minerals inside. More unique to a black hole by not destroying the planet! Look at magnetite, for example. Make a scale model of a planet that is 12" in diameter. Put a powerfull earth magnet in the middle that measures 3" in diameter. Given that the difference in diameter of the earth magnet inside the perimeter of the foam, perfectly centered, the foam that is not displaced represents dirt or lava. Make some models of people with peices of magnetite on their feet. Now, imagine your model planet floating out in space, zero gravity, and unaffected by any other magnetic fields. Notice anything? All your model people with metal and magnetite on their feet tend to stand up and stay on the planet. I know it sounds childish about how I describe this model... You are probabley thinking of the layout of the series Star Trek, when Captain Peckerd visits the BoRgus ship. Their idea of artificial gravity on that ship may not be as primitive as it seems. I did think the giant cube was lame. Imagine a mineral that is like magnetite, but it attracts all things of matter simillar to a Black hole. NO NO NO! Not as strong! Very refined, weak, minerals, bonded or melted into the hull of a space craft and is used in high ammounts on the walkways. It may actually help keep a space craft in one peice! Now, think of our planet being flat, with some form of gravity. This imaginary mineral will allow a flat slab of land in space to exhibit the traits of a spherical planet with a black hole in its core. You definitely need a computer simulation for this one! Now, think about magnetic fields, UFOs, and about propelling objects using the force of the magnetic fields of planets as "free" energy. Have you ever seen the opposite of a black hole? Maybe, one that does not implode, but explode? Magnetically speaking. How about an imploding, black hole that somehow repells masses outside of its own. A tear in space that has no space? I give up.

  • All you Christians are WRONG!!!! My book says that the univers was created by the epervesant treefrog of gruff, I have a relationship with my treefrog, and it listens to me when I talk to it.

    I believe western religion is a minority, I think there are more Hindu (and offshoots of Hindu) in the world than there are are Muslim (and offshoots such as Christian, ect) ...

    You don't need to see a Black Hole it has been proven through math, I'm shure that when experiments were being done on sutch obsure things as the Electron and focused Magnetic fields, many people could not see a practical application for it... Who knows what we will gain from pushing the boundaries of our scientific knowledge....

    I'm done now
  • Steven Hawking calculated that black holes
    have temperature and eventually evaporate after
    unimaginable periods of time. (By virtual
    particle pair creation on the horizon and one half
    escapes, leaking energy.)

    The book in the heading, postulates what the
    universe would be like where the main source
    of energy is the evaporation of black holes.
    This would be after the era of thermonuclear light
    (current) and after all hadrons (protons, etc.)
    had distintigrated. The universe would immensely
    larger, older, colder, darker, and slower than it is now
    (where immense is defined by multiplying/dividing
    all current scales by @10E50.) Yet it might even
    be able to sustain organized patterns- life, intelligence- but immensely slow compared to current such.
  • Scientists are people, natch.

    So when a scientist discovers something, it automatically means that people(individually or not) make the discovery. As opposed to engineers(who are also people), chemists, physicists, astronomers, etc. It's just using a detailed term instead of a more general term.

    Nothing to get all PC over...

    -AS
  • I think the previous post had it right.

    When you do scientific research, you *don't* know what returns you're going to get out.

    In this case, studies of astrophysical objects is useful because it's studying the extreme cases of our current model of physics. The more we can explore, understand, and expand our current model, the more we can take advantage of strange phenomena that arise out of the model.

    Studying black holes, quasars, stars, etc, give us some knowledge about what happens under very extreme gravitational, electromagnetic, and other strange physical effects. What other laboratory do we have to understand quantum/relativistic/gravitational/strange stuff, except our universe? How else do we expect to find out about the nature of quantum reality, and from it the advances that result from said understanding, if we don't try to model it?

    IE, your previous post mentioned we should concentrate on HDTV. Our corporations are doing fine without the goverment in terms of practical advances; market forces and competition take care of that aspect. But 100 years from now, how are our corporations going to create the next Big Thing if we don't have the basic research accomplished in how the universe works? How can they exploit quantum pheonomena, without supercolliders, observing black holes, and playing with Bose-Einstein condensates?


    -AS
  • Well, if we really didn't like our scientists, we could kill them.

    We don't have that luxury with God, I don't think.

    But seriously, God is an unproven requirement for advancement in the moral and ethical area.

    Science is a provem requirement for advancement in the physical area. Science improves our lives. God/Religion hasn't.

    Of course, the reality is that people wield science and people wield religion. The people who are scientists have made life better, on the whole. Have the people who are religious done the same?

    -AS
  • I'll agree that much of Western science is a direct result of Christians; Christianity itself is a different issue. Perhaps it's a misuse, but the term Christianity seems to indicate the Church and the power structure that goes along with it, and I don't think the Church has been very helpful, other than unintended side effects.

    Being Christian is not being anti-science. Being religious is not about being anti-science. I don't doubt your last point, but for very many, bein religious and being Christian is often seems related to an anti-science and anti-progress model.

    -AS
  • In short - this universe will never become one huge black hole
    To take the long view: assuming the universe will expand forever, we'll all end up not in black holes, but as radiation.
    Black holes don't live forever, just a very, very, very, ... very long time. We may see (okay, we won't see, but you know what I mean) a time when the universe consists of nothing but black holes. These will eventually evaporate, and matter may result from this explosion. But that won't last long either. If you take a long enough time frame, everything will decay, and there'll be nothing left but radiation. In the long run, we are all radiation.
    Personally, I find this rather depressing, and would rather believe that we're all going to crunch, and perhaps form another universe. That'd be nice.
  • i mean we all get sucked into it right?

    we all heard the assumption that at the center of the galaxy is a black hole, well, what if at the center of our culture is another black hole: the Internet.

    it just sucks us (and all (that) matter around it) into some never ending online universe

    ;)
  • Yes, but if we really wanted to, we could examine these scientists claims in every detail. However, it is not possible to verify most of the claims in the bible (in fact, it is easier to contradict most of the bible, often using other parts of the bible). Same thing goes for open-source software - sure, we all *believe* linux is more secure than Windows, but how many people have the expertise and time to examine every bit of the code for bugs or trojan horses? The point is, if you wanted to you could, whereas with Windows, you have to put you trust in Bill.
  • I feel that America wastes far too much of its national budget on useless "scientific" research like this.

    Yup, this and other pointless research. I mean, look at the useless "scientific" studies Faraday and Maxwell performed over 100 years ago. Electromagnetism? What the hell is that going to do to improve our world? Yup, this kind of research was simply of no use to us. We should have spent that research money on slide rules for education, and Civil War era weapons for the military. What the hell will someone do with these obscure electric and magnetic fields? Now excuse me as I go listen to the radio, solve some finite element calculations on my computer, mark some waypoints for my flight on my GPS, and surf the internet for information about laser light shows at the planetarium...

  • But a black hole DOES emit radiation!
    It's odd, but here goes: Oftentimes, a pair of particles, one antimatter and one matter, will be spontaneously generated. 99.whatever percent of the time, they either collide with each other and with other particles, destroying themselves again and creating as much energy as it took to make then in the first place.
    Occasionally, one of these pairs is created near a black hole. If one of the pair is sucked into the hole, but the other escapes, the net result is generation of a small amount of antimatter and a small amount of matter by the black hole. These particles eventually collide with other particles, generating X-rays, which is the radiation from a black hole that has been discovered, IIRC.

    And actually, infinity is a bright flaming neon orange and yellow spinning spiral. That's why you go insane when you see it.
  • however, radiation does turn back into matter all the time. For instance, a photon can (and does, all the time) turn into a positron-electron pair. Most of the time,these just collide back together again, giving us radiation again.

    However, new theories suggest that there might be a slight break in this symmetry, in that you can break things like charge conservation, or other things like baryon number conservation. This would explaing why there is a lot more matter out there than anti-matter. If we lived in a universe which was not dominated by either matter or anti-matter then they would keep colliding, spewing forth radiation in from massive explosions, and you wouldn't get to read this somewhat rambling physics comment on a lazy Satruday afternoon from some wacko math guy. :)

  • Was they sure that was a hole in space? I theorize that they were pointed toward Micro$oft's headquarters. That seems to be where all the money is going......
  • The open-ended universe is a truly interesting proposition. Trillions of years (actually something like 10^40 years) from now, when the expansion is so great that new stars are no longer form, and those ancients of the universe, the red giants, have finally exhausted their fuel, the heavens will be lit only by the occasional collision of brown dwarfs fusing to become new starts, and the explosion of black holes. The notion of anything having ultimate permanence is inherently flawed. All fuel will be eventually exhausted. In the case of black holes, they are slowly shrinking due to attrition of mass, what makes black holes "fuzzy" and will eventually explode as a consequence. Particles are constantly popping into existence, something know as Plank radiation ("A theory is not accepted when it's critics are converted, but when they eventually die" - Maxwell Plank. Isn't that a cheery view of the physics community?), and annihilating themselves because they only pop into existence in positive and negative pairs. The only issue is that sometimes particles pop into existence close enough to black holes that one half of the pair is succeed into the black hole before it can destroy itself and sending the lonely particle zooming off into space (the fuzziness), using energy by separating the pair. Our friend Einstein said that mass = energy, so in it's attempt to gobble up more, the black hole has shot itself in the foot by loosing mass in the process of stealing the particle. As the black hole's mass decreases, this process speeds up, and the black hole eventually shrinks so small it explodes. Think supper nova, then think bigger. Now doesn't this all seem splendidly nihilistic? Not event the black holes will survive in a open Universe. Nah, it'll just be a cool light show.

    -Frances
    IM sn = CzarinaFH

  • Re:Implications of black holes in an open ended un (Score:3)

    by drudd ( 43032 ) on Saturday March 25, 2000 @06:58AM (#1173314)
    Its a common misconception that black holes some how "suck" in matter. In fact black holes have exactly the same amount of gravitational attraction as a different object with the same mass. If we replaced our sun with a black hole of the sun's mass, the earth would continue to orbit.

    Since black holes form and grow from matter which was already in the general vicinity, objects which were far away feel the exact same gravitational force, regardless of whether the mass is in star or black hole form.

    Doug
  • I have seen a lot of questions here about white holes and black hole decay. I thin kI should clarify some of the misconceptions.

    Many people have difficulty with the idea of a black hole sucking up matter for all eternity, and have thus looked for a way out, something which allows that matter to be reclaimed by the universe. This has led to some rather interesting theories regarding things like white holes. These theories have never been supported by any astronomical evidence, nor do they even make much logical or mathematical sense, at least not in a typical Einsteinian view of the universe. Fortunately, someone has found a "way out". This person is Stephen Hawking. He devised a mechanism by which a black hole could leak out matter and energy slowly over time. This so-called "Hawking radiation" is emitted proportionally to the size of the black hole at the event horizon. Thus, a large black hole would emit energy and matter much faster than a small one, but a small one could eventually decay to the point where it no longer had the mass to generate the gravity well required to contain light. Of course, this is a VERY slow process, and most black holes are gaining mass many orders of magnitude faster than they are losing them.

    So, yes, if you went into a black hole, you would be able to get out...

    ...In trillions of pieces over trillions of years.

  • Implications of black holes in an open ended univ. (Score:4)

    by RNG ( 35225 ) on Saturday March 25, 2000 @05:30AM (#1173316)
    Hmm,

    the more we look out into space, the more it seems that objects which were once considered extraordinary/rare, are acutally pretty common (quasars, black holes, neutron stars, etc.).

    What are the implications of supermassive black holes in an open ended universe? Does that not suggest that eventually (in 10s of billions of years), everything will eventually be sucked into one of these black holes. Will we eventually have a universe populated by a few (or one) supermassive black hole(s) or am I being overly dramatic here? Are there any models on what the eventual state of such a universe would be? Inquiring minds want to know ...

  • More and better pictures. (Score:4)

    by Raymond Luxury Yacht ( 112037 ) on Saturday March 25, 2000 @03:22AM (#1173317) Homepage
    Drop by NASA [stsci.edu]'s gallery for better shots from space.
  • The distance between two stars in any given galaxy is thousands, millions and billions times smaller that the distance between any two galaxies. Even in an unlikely case that some black hole somewhere would consume the remnants of its galaxy by gravitating them toward itself, the reality is that this black hole, no matter how massive it is will not be affected by gravitational pull of other galaxies nor will it affect any other galaxy by its own gravitational pull. (Use Newton's 3'rd law to calculate the gravitational pull exerted by a black hole onto a galaxy) If you assume a homogenious and an isotropic universe then there will be no preference for a direction a black hole may choose on. However, by the law of Hubble the universe is expanding and so the distances between objects become larger (50 to 100 KM each second for each MGParsec.) What happens is that the Expansion of the Universe is actually greater than the velocity of any type of movement by a black hole created due to gravitational attraction between a black hole and another galaxy.

    In short - this universe will never become one huge black hole, unlike New York or Toronto, which already are.

  • The images produced by Pogge and Martini show material in the inner spiral arms of the galaxies. It's a stretch to refer to this as material "being sucked into gigantic black holes." Note the scale of the images: the resolution is a few hundred light years. The accretion disk around the black hole is less than one light year in radius; it is completely unresolved in thes pictures.

    The material shown in these images MAY be spiralling gradually in towards the center of the galaxies, but it may also be in relatively stable orbits around the center. Suppose that a small component of the total velocity -- which is several hundred km/sec -- is radially inwards. It would take tens of millions of years for the material to reach the black hole.

    Writing that these pictures show gas which is
    "being sucked into a gigantic black hole" is about as accurate as writing "and here's a picture of Angeline Jolie growing old and wrinkled at the Academy Awards ceremony." Sure, technically, she is growing oldER and adding a micro-wrinkle or two as she sits in the audience ... but it's not really relevant under the circumstances.

    By a curious coincidence, I just wrote up a lecture on black holes at the centers of galaxies
    for the introductor astro course I'm teaching. Check out
    [rit.edu]
    http://spiff.rit.edu/richmond/classes/phys240/le ctures/blackholes/blackholes.html.

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