1375863
story
ChazeFroy writes:
"A black hole with a mass of more than 2 million suns has been pinpointed at the center of the Milky Way. Scientists used triangulation based on the acceleration of infrared images of three stars and to find the center. CNN has the story here."
Re:Almost Infinite, Literally! (Score:1)
I think you mean the whole "Cantorian" rap.
Georg Cantor is the guy who came up with major portions of the theory of infinite sets.
---CONFLICT!!---
Re:-1, Snotty (Score:1)
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Re:Black hole experiment (Score:1)
I hate to break it to you dude, but Nature cares very deeply about mathematics. This is why she chose to base all of creation on it.
The fact is people didn't invent mathematics, we merely discovered it.
Look at the whole fiasco over the discovery of irrational numbers and "imaginary" numbers.
No one wanted these, they were forced into accepting their existence.
---CONFLICT!!---
Re:It's progress, but it doesn't go far enough (Score:2)
Is it impossible for a solid object to be partly within and partly outside the event horizon? Why?
Damn, I have to get a good book on this stuff.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
OH MY GOD! (Score:2)
--
Re:Black Holes (Score:2)
Maybe you were readin this one?
> but how eventually when the expansion halted
Uhm, you DO know that not only is the universe expanding, it is ALSO accelerating !
The rate is called the "Hubble constant" which you can read about it here:
Cheers
Re:Internet Troll Hole Pinpointed at Slashdot.org (Score:1)
Connah
Funny Posts (Score:1)
Re:It's progress, but it doesn't go far enough (Score:2)
--
Re:Now, I'm No Scientist.. (Score:1)
Re:I thought... (Score:1)
Stars are big and hence they have a big gravitational field. What prevents the star from collapsing is basically the heat and light it produces by fusing lighter elements into heavy ones. When the star runs out of available hydrogen to burn it then starts to burn helium and so on up/across the periodic table until it reaches iron which it can't fuse because the released enegy per nucleon is negative.
(non-MS)ie. It don't produce any heat.
The star then begins to collpse. There are various thing that can happen, depending on the mass of the star. If it is big enough, the whole shebang colapses until the core is hyper-compact and reaches the exclusion-principle limit. The outer layers rebound at a fair old fraction of the speed of light (10%???) producing a supernova (I forget which type, IIa???). If it is still above a certain mass, the Chandrasekhar limit IIRC, then it collapses further until the curvature of space around it becomes infinite (as per Gen'l Relativity).
Voilà. Black hole. (All corections welcome:-)
Elgon
Re:Detecting black holes (Score:1)
Gravitational lensing has never been and will never be used to detect the presence of a black hole.
The reason? It's not that gravitational lensing does not exist, or even that it's not dramatic enough to detect. The reason is that no black hole is close enough for us to use parallax to know the true positions of stars behind it. The way gravitational lensing works is by being able to detect when stars are out of place (not where they should be) due to their light being bent by a super-massive black hole. We would never know where these background stars should be so we can never figure out if they have moved.
So you just demonstrated how horribly uniformed on the tremendous size of the universe you are, and how that results in us not being able to use gravitational lensing to detect black holes.
Re:OH MY GOD! (Score:1)
Oh, don't worry about that either. As the sun revs up over the next billion years, all of the water on Earth will evaporate and we'll all die of dehydration.
T. M. Pederson
"...and so the moral of the story is: Always Make Backups."
Re:Heh (Score:2)
of course, the above numbers are upper limits on the radius; a BH can always be *smaller* than the Swarzschild radius, but never larger.
Re:Star suckers (Score:1)
We can stop the destruction (Score:1)
As an aside, do things in the northern hemisphere of the universe flush one way down a black hole, while in the southern hemisphere, they flush the other?
--
Re:Now, I'm No Scientist.. (Score:1)
For those that haven't read it, Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" is an excellent book that covers black holes.
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Re:size? (Score:2)
Re:English as a language (Score:1)
Re:Galaxy runs linux! SHOCK HORROR (Score:1)
cat center.galaxy.txt >
but even that wouldn't do what you wanted, because center.galaxy.txt would still exist, and doing
cat
wouldn't be the same either, because then it's the black hole going into the galaxy, not the other way around.
I think what you're looking for is
alias 'blackhole=rm -rf'
blackhole center.galaxy.txt
Re:Heh (Score:1)
Re:Detecting black holes (Score:2)
Positive particle do get sucked in just as often as the negative ones. The difference is that normal matter loses potential energy when falling, whereas "negative matter" gains energy as it falls. This is the magic that allows the remaining particle to become "real"... Sounds a little fuzzy, I admit. Fair question. I don't know. The smaller the hole is, the greater the tidal forces at the event horizon. Stronger tidal forces mean that pair of virtual particles is more likely to be ripped apart, just like you'd be ripped apart if you got near the event horizon of small black hole.
Re:Stupid moderators! (Score:2)
Does anyone know what the term for a particle with negative energy actually is?
Oh my golly gee. Whitey's at it again. (Score:1)
Re:centrifugal force (was - Re:Not to be pedantic) (Score:1)
After her body came to rest against the window and the door, she was experiencing centripital acceleration in the literal sense. (Although the car is not a string, and she is not a yo-yo (I dont know her), the factors are the same. The car is keeping her on the arc of a circle.)
Oh man, if that's true (Score:1)
Re:Are we really this dumb? (Score:1)
Have no sense.
You tried to be funny with this?
Re:Are we really this dumb? (Score:1)
And jerk (a parameter I've only seen referred to once) is the derivative over time of acceleration
Re:Time Dialation (Score:1)
Re:Stupid people! (Score:2)
Okay, first off, it's not a matter of chance. Something is real, or it isn't. The theory is either real to the world in this respect or it isn't. There is no way to measure what the "chances" are that it's correct, and as we all know, if you can't measure it, it's not science.
And a theory can be completely and totally correct in every respect except one, and still be wrong.
Also, note that I don't thing it's incorrect here, I just don't see how you can get the particle/unparticle explanation from the math of it. Seems like that's a made up explanation for mass comsumption.
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Black Hole Sued For Copyright Infringement (Score:3)
It's progress, but it doesn't go far enough (Score:1)
These are the things we still don't know, and I'm afraid we'll never know them within my lifetime.
Re:2.6 million stars in that space? try 10x that! (Score:1)
If (by the greatest of all possible spaces) you are using the min distance Mars-Sun as the diameter of a sphere of space, you can use 4/3*pi*r^3 to get a V of 4.62*10^24 km^3. Sol's V is 1.412*10^18. You can only fit 3.3 million suns in there.
If you just take the linear distance, you can only fit 308 suns in there.
Either way, that is a shit-load of suns in a relatively small space (compared to the normal distance between suns).
Re:2.6 million stars in that space? try 10x that! (Score:1)
Huh? (Score:2)
Re:We knew the black hole was there.. (Score:2)
First it was the flouride in the water, then it was the ozone layer, currently it's like "oh no, we'll all be killed by the Asteroid!". Next big thing will be "We're all going to be swallowed up by the black hole!".
Re:2.6 million stars in that space? try 10x that! (Score:1)
At least i know i was not alone in my mistake...this time. ;-)
Re:Great Barrier (Score:2)
Kierthos
Re:Detecting black holes (Score:2)
Actually, I have one other quibble with your explanation: the virtual particle pairs are not particle/anti-particle pairs. They're more like particle/unparticle pairs. Anti-matter just has a negative charge (relative to normal matter); the stuff that we're talking about actually has negative energy. The difference is that when particles and anti-particles annihilate, they leave a huge amount of energy, whereas when a virtual particle pair annihilates, it leaves absolutely nothing. 1 + (-1) = 0
At least, that's the way I heard it.
Oh, Yeah! (Score:2)
2.6 million stars in that space? try 10x that! (Score:5)
That shouldn't be at all shocking. Even if we take the minimum orbital distance of Mars (~206.7e6 kms), you can fit the equivalent of 26,193,511 Sol volumes within that space. (given the radius of Sol to be 6.96e5 kms)
So, even NOT counting on compression from the incredible amount of mass, you could fit 26 million stars the mass of the sun into the "relatively tiny space".
Given that the numbers match so closely, except for the decimal place, i suspect one of two things:
1) The article writer is amazed you can fit the volume of a marble into the volume of a basketball.
or
2) The article writer put the decimal in the wrong spot, and discovered you can put volume "V" into the space of volume "V"
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
Is that really nougat in a Three Musketeers? I thought nougat was stickier... gooier... and tan. Three Musketeers seems to have kind of a nougat foam in the middle. Weird.
Re:Are we really this dumb? (Score:1)
Re:actually.. (Score:1)
Being a Brit living abroad I was delighted to find that America had Milky Ways and Mars Bars. I was less than delighted to find out they were not the same as the British originals. Same name different product
Re:size? (Score:3)
But neither black hole can hold a candle to the hole at the center of M87, the giant elliptical galaxy at the center of the Virgo cluster. This titan weighs in at several billion suns, and emits relativistic jets of matter from its poles.
Astronomers are very close to demonstrating that the phonemenon known as quasars, are nothing more than an active black hole, swallowing matter at a prodiguous rate in young galaxies that have undergone a burst of star formation. Our galaxy is likely to have shown quasar properties in times past. But as the concentration of matter near the center of a galaxy decreases as it is consumed by the black hole, the quasars turn off.
Astronomers are also gaining new insights into the role of central black holes in the formation of galaxies. It appears that the galaxy and the hole evolved together - the hole provides the gravitational anchor, pulling in nearby gas clouds, which collapse to form stars. We may have never come to exist were it not for the galaxy-forming propensity of massive black holes.
The Next Generation Space Telescope is expected to answer these questions one way or another. It is hoped that it will be able to image very young galaxies in the process of formation, or perhaps even find evidence of naked black holes just beginning to draw in the surrounding primordial gas. That would be quite a find, since it would imply that the black holes came first, and raises the question: from what? Were the created somehow in the maelstrom of the Big Bang, or was there a very early era of star formation that preceeded the era of galaxy formation?
Composition of Black Hole is really... (Score:1)
It's all true! ±5%
Re:Detecting black holes (Score:5)
"The theory goes (extremely roughly) that as individual particles reach the "edge" (event horizon?) of the black hole (crossing this line means you never come back), some of them are torn apart, half of the particle going in, half going out, and some energy is released during this fission"
Sorry, but that's a little too rough. Particles are not ripped in two. Rather, at the event horizon, just like everywhere else, virtual particle/antiparticle pairs are constantly being formed and annihiliated as allowed by the uncertainty principle (they don't last long enough to be detectable, so they don't violate any conservation laws). However, being at the event horizon, some of these pairs get formed, and then one of the two particles gets trapped by the black hole, and its partner does not annihilate undetectably quickly, but rather sticks around long enough to collide with other matter or decay or both, thus producing Hawking radiation.
Now someone can correct my rough explanation and eventually we'll get this straight...
Your speedometer doesn't measure velocity (Score:2)
Re:It's progress, but it doesn't go far enough (Score:2)
We knew the black hole was there.. (Score:2)
If you read the article you would note that we pinpointed it's location in the milky way
Read the article, then post.
[phpwebhosting.com]
nerdfarm.org
Re:Are we really this dumb? (Score:3)
Here's a test: On a *snap* basis, figure out what the difference is between acceleration and speed.
Most people won't think about the difference, as most folks think speed=acceleration.
Try it out - go around and ask 5 average folks (you may have a few around) what 'acceleration' means... betcha they all say 'how fast something is going'.
Detecting black holes (Score:4)
That type of radiation is called Hawking Radiation (after Stephen Hawking, naturally). However, this isn't what lets us detect black holes, as Hawking Radiation is ridiculously faint. Black holes can be detected by the X-Rays that they "inadvertantly" produce. When matter is falling into a black hole it is accelerated, heated, and compressed to such a degree that it gives off large amounts of X-Rays. I believe the first black hole we detected (again, assuming black holes exist), was Cygnus X-1 (or cygnus something), and we detected it by the x-rays it gave off.
Another method of detecting black holes is to look for graviational lensing effects. Because black holes are so massive, they bend the fabric of space time. (Imagine a sheet suspended in the air. Place marbles on the sheet. The marbles make depressions on the sheet, like stars make "depressions" in space-time. A black hole is so heavy, it's like dropping something that is the size of a marble but with the weight of a bowling ball onto the sheet. The sheet bends A LOT, and it actually will have a hole where the singularity is.) Light travels in a straight line, so if space-time curves, light also curves with space-time. Gravitational lensing was proved during a solar eclipse. Astronomers observing the eclipse noted that they were able to see stars that should have been blocked by the eclipsed sun. The sun's gravitational field caused enough "lensing" so that stars directly behind the star could be seen to either side of the star. So, if we find something out in space that is causing a LARGE amount of gravitational lensing, but we can't see anything, there's a chance it's a black hole. At that point we normally observe it more to determine if it is or isn't a black hole.
Star suckers (Score:2)
Even if it's not pulling in other stars yet, I'll bet it'l suck the fillings out of my great,great,great,great,great,great,great,great,g
Wonder why it's not eating stars yet, the density there should be high enough for some motion..
Re:2.6 million stars in that space? try 10x that! (Score:4)
Given that the numbers match so closely, except for the decimal place, i suspect one of two things:
1) The article writer is amazed you can fit the volume of a marble into the volume of a basketball.
or
2) The article writer put the decimal in the wrong spot, and discovered you can put volume "V" into the space of volume "V"
I vote for option 3), 4), or a combination of the two:
3) The amount of space is "tiny" compared to the amount of space taken up by stars in the rest of the galaxy. Stars are seldom packed one against the other.
4) The writer is using copy from descriptions of smaller black holes. The even horizon's radius grows in linear proportion to a black hole's mass, if I remember correctly.
This means that volume grows far faster than mass. Black holes with the mass of a mountain are smaller than an atom; a black hole the mass of the sun have a radius of about 3 km. More massive black holes, however, have less density. In fact, if the universe is closed (i.e. returning to a "Big Crunch"), it would be the perfect example of a very sparse black hole - transplant a sufficiently large chunk of it to a reasonably flat space, and an observer outside of the transplanted chunk would see an event horizon surrounding it.
Re:OH MY GOD! (Score:2)
--
Proof positive (Score:2)
"This galaxy really does suck."
centrifugal force (was - Re:Not to be pedantic) (Score:2)
'Centrifugal force' is a force defined from a non-Newtonian reference frame, and as such, is not a true force. A force can only be defined from within a Newtonian reference frame, so your implication that she is incorrect is correct. (Does that make sense?)
What your wife is actually feeling (aside from the bump) is her linear inertia taking her in a straight line while the car turns away from that line. So, she bumps into the window.
When she asks you what she is feeling ("I'm feeling something, so what is it, Mr. Smary-Pants?"), you can tell her that what people typically call 'centrifugal force' is actually the other side of 'centripetal force'. Centripetal force is the tension in the string when you swing a Yo-Yo over your head; centripetal force keeps an object traveling in a circle.
Try this, Newton's first law of motion says that it takes force to move something or change it's straight line motion at constant speed (in Newton's world being at rest and traveling with a constant velocity are the same thing, the first glimpse of relativity), and you are traveling in your car in a straight line, with constant speed. You turn the wheel and the car starts turning, which means that acceleration is being applied to the car to change it's velocity. This acceleration is called centripetal acceleration.
In conclusion, there is no centrifugal force, although it appears to be a force, but it is measured from the wrong reference.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Re:Now, I'm No Scientist.. (Score:2)
So it would be more likely that the Earth would get "eaten" by that cubic inch. Then again, if that chunk of black hole is too small to maintain its integrity, it may just evaporate violently and blow everything in the immediately spacial environment to plasma...
Windows on the event horizon (Score:2)
Take a Windows 2000 server, link it up by some radio connection, and place it near the event horizon of a black hole.
The effect of time dialation would decrease the MTBF dramatically, with only a minor change in processing speed (slow down a Windoze server by a factor of 1E9 and I doubt anyone would notice).
[Unfortunately, there would still need to be a sysAdmin sleeping next to the server to handle the occaisional (every 10,000 years) crash, but then again, that's probably the best use of someone with an MCSE anyway.]
This dramatic improvement in reliability could be a "hole" new marketing angle for MS. Maybe we could put the entire
Re:It's progress, but it doesn't go far enough (Score:2)
--
That's nothing (Score:2)
--
Re:Now, I'm No Scientist.. (Score:2)
Re:Detecting black holes (Score:2)
Re:I thought... (Score:2)
not too relevant in this case (Score:2)
Re:Probing the inside of a black hole? (Score:2)
Re:It's progress, but it doesn't go far enough (Score:2)
Personally I think there's a lot of evidence that ignoring quantum effects is wrong. There is a lot of evidence that interesting quantum effects take place at the event horizon so that the laws of physics we currently have break down well before the singularity. Connecting quantum mechanics and general relativity is the biggest challenge facing theoretical physics right now but I home we see some glimmer of understanding within your lifetime!
--Re:centrifugal force (was - Re:Not to be pedantic) (Score:2)
If you're really Louis Wu, why don't you use the puppeteer hyperdrive to have a look at the galactic core like Beowulf Schaeffer did, instead of reading Slashdot?
All I gotta say... (Score:2)
Re:Probing the inside of a black hole? (Score:2)
Re:Detecting black holes (Score:2)
For the ones interested, the uncertainty principle variant for this situation is:
dE * dt >= h-bar,
where
dE = the pair's energy, meaning the amount of energy that is "borrowed" from vacuum in order to create it
dt = the amount of time the pair lives
h-bar = Planck's constant divided by 2*pi
Flavio
Re:It's progress, but it doesn't go far enough (Score:2)
Re:Saving the species. (Score:2)
Devil Ducky
Schwarzchild Radius (Score:2)
size? (Score:3)
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
A Snickers is peanuts & caramel wrapped in chocolate. It used to be called a Marathon in the UK until the early 90s.
A Milky Way in the UK (and Australia) is just that fluffy stuff wrapped in chocolate. In the USA, a Milky Way also has a layer of caramel over the fluffy stuff. NO peanuts.
I have this on good authority, as an Englishman working in the states - I just asked the guys in the office.
Re: Now, I'm No Scientist.. (Score:3)
--weenie NT4 user: bite me!
Re:It's progress, but it doesn't go far enough (Score:2)
Of course you can't make a clean split between gauge theory and string theory and you can quantise strings as a gauge theory.
--Are we really this dumb? (Score:2)
"images of three stars to measure their acceleration -- or how fast the stars were speeding up--" [emphasis mine]
Was it really necessary to define acceleration? Are people in general really this illiterate?
Zipwow
Re:It's progress, but it doesn't go far enough (Score:2)
Suppose you had a platform or spaceship or something orbiting a small black hole, just above the event horizon. Now, that platform would be moving at just under light speed, but so what.
Now, what if you lowered a cable down towards the event horizon, while simultaneously extending a cable upwards to keep everything balanced out. This is pretty much the standard "space elevator" concept.
Why couldn't you be able to get the bottom end of the lower cable down into the event horizon, and measure the Hawking radiation effects directly? Then, you could pull the cable back out when you were finished the experiment - The end of the cable would then be escaping from the black hole.
I think the only problem (remember, this is a thought experiment) would be making a cable strong enough to withstand the gravitational pull. Would this be fundamentally impossible?
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Re:Are we really this dumb? (Score:2)
Re:Black Holes (Score:2)
When a star collapses the matter begins to implode upon a point, eventually crossing the point where the escape velocity becomes greater than the speed of light and a black hole is formed. The edge of this black hole is what we call the event horizon - anything passing within the event horizon cannot ever escape. The simple solution is described by the Schwartzchild metric.
The matter however is still collapsing to a point at the centre of the black hole. According to general relativity there is nothing to stop this collapse and we end up with a point of infinite density and zero volume - a singularity.
However when you come to rotating black holes (described by the Kerr metric) there are differences. The angular momentum of a collapsing star is conserved, and this causes the black hole's event horizon to bulge out along the equitorial plane, much like the Earth has a slight bulge around its equator. Indeed, the central singularity itself forms a torus rather than a point when the black hole is rotating.
As angular momentum is increased this bulge gets bigger and the polar size of the event horizon shrinks, until eventually you are left without an event horizon at all, but just a torus-shaped singularity, which is said to be "naked".
Of course, whether a naked singularity can ever exist is an open question. There is something called the "Cosmic Censorship Principle" which states that the laws of physics will never allow a naked singularity to form, but the final answer is "we don't know".
Also of interest is that since the naked singularity would be in the shape of a torus you could theoretically pass through the centre of the torus and find yourself somewhere completely different, possibly even in another universe!
For a fairly technical intro to black holes and singularities, see this article [suite101.com] at suite101.
Internet Troll Hole Pinpointed at Slashdot.org (Score:5)
Experts say the Slashdot Troll Hole has been continually drawing hundreds of trolls to the site for over three years. "It seems to present an incredible attractive force to individuals with an abundance of spare time," explained Michael Czekjum of the Internet Engineering Task Force. "Once drawn, they find themselves compelled to inundate comments with disguised obscene hyperlinks, single-minded knee-jerk insulting replies and vacuous first post attempts."
While today's pinpointing of the hole represents a great triumph, officials stress there is still much to learn. Early analysis seems to suggest it is expanding. Datapoints from Slashdot's founding in late 1997 show an almost complete lack of trolls. Since then, their numbers have expanded at a geometric rate. The types of individuals being attracted is also being studied. "While traditional text-based trolls are still in the majority, the past six months have seen a great increase in graphical trolls, using primitive ASCII representations," wrote Ari T'teyel of Sun Microsystems in a paper published last week. "In addition, the hole's effect on other individuals, such as karma whores, is as yet unknown."
The Troll Hole draws in
Re:Probing the inside of a black hole? (Score:2)
I assume your thoughts about ripples are along the lines of having an object split up inside the black hole, so that there would be two little masses instead of one big one.. But outside the event horizon, the black hole acts like a point source of gravity, no matter how split up things were inside.
--
I'm Upset (Score:2)
I don't know what to do! I may have to go to ZDNet or do something equally dumb.
Devil Ducky
Precise definition of Hawking radiation (Score:2)
Re:Detecting black holes (Score:3)
1) how come more negative (un-, if you wish) than positive particles are attracted?
1.1) how come gravity works the same on unparticles? Shouldn't they be repelled?
2) why does this happen at a faster rate for small black holes (I understand that rate of evaporation is inversely proportional to mass)[/i]
You're taking the particle/un-particle pair too seriously. While that's the conventional explanation, it doesn't quite fit the math. In fact, the math admits of no explanation. It's just mathematics.
Anyway, having looked hard at the math until my head buzzed, I couldn't see how the standard particle/un-particle explanation fit. However, I also couldn't see any 'real world' explanation that fits either.
Virtual particles are tricky bastards.
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Re:Why does Kormendy say, (Score:2)
Time Dialation (Score:2)
-1, Snotty (Score:2)
Thanks for the definitions. It really helped out those of us who have never owned, driven, or ridden in an automobile before!
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actually.. (Score:5)
scientists have triangulated it's ooey gooey goodness using several rats and a nougascope.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
Re:actually.. (Score:2)
Actually...
When the Mars candy company created the Milky Way and Three Musketeers bars, somehow along the way they messed up the packaging. The Milky Way bar was meant to be the bar with a creamy, non-nutty center that eventually became the Three Musketeers bar, and vice-versa. The Milky Way ended up with three main layers (Peanuts, Nougat, and Chocolate). Three layers, Three Musketeers, get it? Yes, I'm sure you do.
Yeah, a life would be in order, but I'm too busy munching down on the Milky Way and filtering the world's Tequila supply with my liver. Oh, well.
Re:Star suckers (Score:2)
Now, I'm No Scientist.. (Score:3)
------------
CitizenC
Re:Probing the inside of a black hole? (Score:2)
Assume we can fling massive (order of the black hole itself) objects about at near light speed. No problem
Fling such an object past the black hole at a close distance, and observe the path of the object, plus the gravity waves from it and the black hole.
What I don't know is what current theory would predict about the results of this experiment: would it let you observe the internal structure of the black hole indirectly -- in a sense, would you hear how it rattles, and know what's in the box?
The paradox for me is that the gravitons (again assuming they exist) would travel at the speed of light, and thus not escape the event horizon any better than anything else, but still the existence of the event horizon depends on the effects of the gravitons. Huh?
So, what would this experiment do?
Error in original post! (Score:2)
Once again, the Slashdot moderators have messed up the facts again. As stated (url: http://www.mars.com/facts.asp?op=milkyway [mars.com]) here [mars.com], the center of the MilkyWay is not a black hole.
THE FACTS: The MilkyWay is often consumed into what may be considered a black hole. However, if this were indeed a black hole, the black hole would not appear to gain mass.
For instance, one 40-year-old male who had taken part in the study, funded by the United States Food and Drug Administration [fda.gov]. Where a black hole would compress the matter to a mere geometric point, the black hole referred to in the study actually appeared to expand when the chocolate-malt product was consumed. When enough MilkyWay are regularly consumed, the subject will experience an increased capacity to eat; the capacity increasing with each sitting.
More concerned are the exercise professionals. "Those who consume too much of the product will put personal trainers out of business," suggests Jed Smith, Editor, American Human Body Focus. "People," he adds, "will no longer see a need to keep their bodies fit. Consumers are putting millions of professional trainers at risk of losing their job."
Cynthia Lamon, of the Maximum Performance Association of Athletic trainers (MPAA), has vowed to encourage US Congressional support of the Diet Manipulation Consumption Act (DMCA), currently a bill which was introduced and passed by the House. Pending the approval of the Senate, the President would then be asked for his approval.
The DMCA, if passed, require the millions who consume the MilkyWay chocolate-malt bar to accept the planned licensing agreement displayed on the outside of the packaging. Additionally, if the licensing provisions state so, those who wish to consume the sacred bar will be required to slice the bars only with Mars-KitchenWare utensils. Such sets of tools are alleged to offer technological advantages over traditional fork and knife sets.
The food items will also contain Crafted Structured Starch (CSS) technology, which would make splitting the food fibers impossible without the KitchenWare tools, which are able to unbind the additives which ensure the foods are sanitized.
Re:Not to be pedantic. . . (Score:4)
Of course, if I did that less often she might be able to think more clearly about classical mechanics...
Before panic sets in... (Score:2)
The Earth is in no danger whatsoever of being sucked into this black hole. The reason: the black hold has a mass of roughly 26 million suns. That's a finite mass, even if it is of near-infinite density. Expand that into a star with that mass. This star has the same mass as the black hole, and therefore has the same gravitational pull as the black hole. No more, no less.
So then why don't we get sucked into the star? Because gravitational pull is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, not from the surface of an object, but the center of gravity of the object. When the star collapses into the black hole, its center of gravity stays in about the same spot.
What this means is that, once you're further away from the black hole than the radius of the original star, the black hold has no more gravitational pull on you than the original star did. It's when you go inside that radius that the hole's pull gets really strong. So, if our sun were to collapse into a black hole at this very instant (which it can't do, but let's say it does for the sake of argument), we would be in no more danger of falling into the black hole than we were of falling into the sun. We'd be screwed anyway, due to the loss of solar energy and the X-ray bombardment, but we wouldn't fall into the black hole.
This is important, because studies have shown that the solar system is moving further away from the center of the Milky Way, not closer to it. Therefore, the Earth is perfectly safe from this new "threat."
IANAP - I Am Not A Physicist.
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well... (Score:2)
Re:We knew the black hole was there.. (Score:2)
Well, I think they concluded that the radio source is the same as the black hole.
To quote John Kormendy (quoted in the article) "'And the nice thing is they intersect right on top, almost exactly, of this radio source, Sagittarius A, which people have long suspected is a black hole.'"