Trio of Big Black Holes Spotted In Galaxy Smashup 74
sciencehabit writes Astronomers staring across the universe have spotted a startling scene: three supermassive black holes orbiting close to one another, two of them just a few hundred light-years apart. The trio, housed in a pair of colliding galaxies, may help scientists hunting for ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves.
Why did I read that as nipples in space time (Score:1)
Why did I read that as nipples in space time
Re:Why did I read that as nipples in space time (Score:5, Funny)
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Perhaps you're channeling Albert Einstein. He saw a lot of nipples in his lifetime that didn't belong to his wives.
Alternatively (Score:2)
may help scientists hunting for ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves
Or more accurately, black holes waving.
A four million year orbit (Score:4, Insightful)
just 450 light-years apart and orbit each other every 4 million years.
I can't stop thinking that a four million year orbit means humans will have populated that galaxy before those black holes have completed one more cycle.
We're like smart bacteria inside a human being. We could learn about the season cycle, but but the time winter comes, innumerable generations of our descendants will already have killed our host and traveled to other ones.
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Nope.
We will most likely die on our piece of meaningless dirt before the universe can say "Jack Robinson".
Star trek is high fantasy, not science fiction.
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To believe that I'd need more historical references of creatures or cultures extinct by their own means.
History is reality. The world didn't begin our birth day.
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Internal fuel won't do it ... (Score:1)
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At less than 10^-29 g/cc, I'm afraid the average energy density of the universe doesn't bode well for external fuel either. Lucky for us, Andromeda will be here soon enough. As I've stated before, the rest of the entire universe is rushing away from us as fast as it can. They just don't like us. We're pretty much stuck here.
Re:A four million year orbit (Score:5, Informative)
"What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?" - The Quarterly Review, March, 1825.
"That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced." - Scientific American, January 2, 1909.
"A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth's atmosphere." - The New York Times, January 13, 1920
"To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth—all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances." - Lee De Forest, 1957
They are 4.3 billion light-years away. They have already orbited each other a thousand full cycles since the observation (Well, you know what I mean.)
and they will spin another thousand before anything from here can reach them.
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"That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced." - Scientific American, January 2, 1909.
Pretty much correct up to this day.
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Pretty much correct up to this day.
Have you ever been in a car accident at over 50km/h? Are you still alive and healthy? Would you still be had it happened in a 1909 car?
I'd say "not killing the user" is a pretty nifty improvement. I'd even call it a feature.
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Ok, you're right. In automobile technology, in the last century, there have been no fundamental scotsmen. ... I mean... changes.
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The subject you obviously know _nothing_ about is 'metallurgy'. Look it up.
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Ok, you're right. In automobile technology, in the last century, there have been no fundamental scotsmen. ... I mean... changes.
Why don't you ask the original person quoted what he meant by "radical?" The statement is vague, and anybody can endlessly debate what constitutes a "radical" change.
Presumably when he made the quote cars were in fact changing just as they change today.
The one change to cars that I would consider a fairly radical one is the hybrid. They typically incorporate continuous transmissions, regenerative braking, the ability to operate from power sources, and the ability to recharge. Combining all of those thing
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hand cranks and cord pulling (Score:2)
In 1911, Charles F. Kettering, with Henry M. Leland, of Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (DELCO) invented and filed U.S. Patent 1,150,523 for the first electric starter in America.
So glad I don't have to start my car the same way I start an old lawnmower.
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Let me be the first to say: "What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of me finding several trillion dollars and ruling the world with an iron fist?" - Your future ruler 2014
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The logic is: "People have been wrong about things for hundreds of years. You are a person. Therefore, you are wrong."
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Technically known as a "false syllogism".
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"That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced." - Scientific American, January 2, 1909."
Essentially correct, and still true today. They might look nicer and be more comfortable now, but practical top speed has barely increased since.
Hmmm, my current car cruises comfortably at 130+ mph and a past one topped out around 180 mph. Not sure a 1909 vehicle even makes 100 mph reliably, although they did exist, as the top speed set in 1909 was roughly 120mph. Wonder what the gas mileage was, not to mention the teeth loosening adrenaline rush.
"A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth's atmosphere." - The New York Times, January 13, 1920"
Incorrect obviously, but only marginal improvements in efficiency have been made since the 1960's.
TBH, there's not much you can do to increase the efficiency of the most efficient simple chemical fuel combo in existence. In a thrust based concept, if you're using all the energy available as thrust, you'
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Care to compare humanity's travel technology between four million years in the past and now?
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Well, we went from 5pmh to 5pmh in the first 4 million years. :)
In the last couple hundred, we went from 5pmh to almost 150,000mph.
From the 10^0 range to the 10^4th range, and most of that is in the last 50.
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I should note that we're going to triple that 150k in a few years with another solar probe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
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Well the problem is space has a lot of particles, and when your space ship pushes them out of the way or into the funnel at near relativistic speeds it generates a lot of lethal radiation [wikipedia.org]; if it wasn't for that everybody would be cruising the galaxy in their Bussard Ramjets [wikipedia.org].
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Care to compare humanity's travel technology between four million years in the past and now?
Sure - our ancestors traveled at a minuscule fraction of the speed of light, as do we today. :)
I get your point, but it is pretty speculative to suggest that travel faster than the speed of light will ever be possible. No physical law of nature prevented any of the advances you've quoted - they were just engineering challenges. Over a span of even thousands of years I'm sure we'll be impressed with what mankind achieves with engineering.
However, I don't think anybody can make any bets either way on whethe
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I get your point, but it is pretty speculative to suggest that travel faster than the speed of light will ever be possible. No physical law of nature prevented any of the advances you've quoted - they were just engineering challenges.
No current physical law. All the advances were preceded by a new understanding of how the universe worked. All the advances that will come, will also be preceded by new understandings.
I postulate that the only constant is our own ignorance. I will not argue that we may reach a point where we know everything and thus can't advance any more. I just don't believe that point exists, but I have nothing to support that belief.
Over a span of even thousands of years I'm sure we'll be impressed with what mankind achieves with engineering.
However, I don't think anybody can make any bets either way on whether there are ways to effectively travel faster than the speed of light. There may or may not be new physics out there that we can rely on. We don't get to invent the laws of nature - we can only exploit what we discover, and there may or may not be anything useful to discover.
Oh, I see we did reason in the same direction. Ok, then I agree with you in everything b
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No current physical law
When was the last time a physical law was broken ?
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It's our understanding of those laws that might change.
We currently believe the speed of light to be an absolute. We didn't always believe that, and we might not in the future. The cool thing about science is that we're not locked into anything that future experimentation and discovery gets us.
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The problem is the gaps in our knowledge where new physics can be found keeps shrinking. Every experiment at the LHC has further supported the Standard Model. All we're mainly doing now is tacking on more places to the right of the decimal. We keep confirming just how right we are about how the universe works, and everything that we know says you can't go faster than light.
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That's hubris.
If we're still around four million years from now, we'll look back us 2014 the same we we look at cavemen.
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FTL == Fucked Time Line (Score:2)
The speed of light is a hard constraint, akin to the "clock rate" of the universe. It is the greatest possible change in spatial coordinates for a given unit of time. Thinking of it in terms of a speed or speed limit is less useful: it's a fundamental property of the universe. One consequence of this is that photons do not experience time in any meaningful sense between emission and absorption. Another more relevant consequence is that if any event (e.g. a spacecraft) does exceed the rate of event propagati
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No current physical law. All the advances were preceded by a new understanding of how the universe worked.
None of the examples you cited involved a change in the understanding of the laws of physics.
We don't get to invent the laws of nature - we can only exploit what we discover, and there may or may not be anything useful to discover.
Oh, I see we did reason in the same direction. Ok, then I agree with you in everything but the "may not be anything useful to discover".
I said, "there may or may not be anything useful to discover." That is actually a tautology, so there really isn't much to disagree with.
You may happen to believe that there is something useful to discover that will enable light speed travel. That's nice, and I'd like to hope that it is true. However, there is really no reason to believe that it is. The universe could simply suck.
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You don't necessarily have to travel faster than the speed of light to get from point A to point B faster than light can, because Warp Drives [design-engineering.com] actually seem plausible now.
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The article states
If the two black holes composing the newfound pair are equally distant from Earth, they're just 450 light-years apart and orbit each other every 4 million years
Can someone explain, or is this a typo? Do they not know if they're the same distance?
I ain't a space scientist, and I hope that what I say is correct --- please correct me if I am wrong --- what TFA is saying is, Black Hole 1 (Point A) and Black hole 2 (Point B) are spinning with each others and we are at a fixed reference point (Point C)
In other words, Point A, Point B and Point C make up a triangle, with Point A and Point B spinning with each other.
What TFA suggests is that when Black Hole 1 (Point A) and Black Hole 2 (Point B) happens to link to the fixed reference point (Point C) in whi
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Parsing English is teh hard.
The "they" in that sentence refers to the two nouns preceding it.
1. The new-found pair [of black holes].
2. Earth
They're 450 LY apart.
Re:Please explain (Score:4, Insightful)
If we are looking at the system from "above", like looking down on a plate on which peas are rolling around, then the apparent distance between them is the same as the actual distance between them. If we're looking at them edge-on, then we don't really know how far apart they are. The apparent distance sets the lower bound for the actual distance, but the upper bound is unknown. And yes, there's always a degree of conjecture in astronnomy. All we can really say is that there are three black holes near the centre of that galaxy, and they are almost certainly in orbit around each other.
What people don't seem to understand is, science relies on publishing of un-proven theories. You observe, model, predict, publish, and eventually you will be either proven right or wrong. Without the "publish" step, especially in long-term sciences like astronomy where it could take centuries for a theory to tested (such as, "will that comet return in a hundred years"), you could make a thousand contradictory predictions and then publish the one that happened - by co-incidence - to be correct. If you limit yourself to a single prediction, which turns out to be correct, then you are worth paying attention to. My mum is always saying "Scientists keep getting things wrong, therefore all science is rubbish". Getting things wrong is crucual to scientific progress.
Re:Please explain (Score:5, Insightful)
For all intents and purposes, the objects are the same distance from Earth. They're 450 light-years from each other and both are approximately 4.3 BILLION light-years from Earth. The maximum difference in distance between object A and Earth and object B and Earth is 0.000010465116% (450 / 4.3x10^9 * 100). Close enough to the same distance. For reference, the same delta applied to 1 AU (93,000,000 mile Earth-Sun distance) yields 9.73 miles.
Touch this black hole dude (Score:3, Insightful)
I learned one important thing from that web site: It was programmed by yet another clown who feels it's vital to have a menu overlay taking up 25% of my scarce phone screen real estate.
I propose a Constitutional amendment to execute them. Whoever decided tiny screens need to be even tinier deserves it.
confusing headline (Score:1)
From the headline, I thought this was a story about damage to a smartphone.