Largest Eruption In the Known Universe Is ~100 Times the Size of Milky Way 73
StartsWithABang writes: At the center of almost every galaxy is a supermassive black hole (SMBH); at the center of almost every cluster is a supermassive galaxy with some of the largest SMBHs in the Universe. And every once in a while, a galactocentric black hole will become active, emitting tremendous amounts of radiation out into the Universe as it devours matter. This radiation can cut across the spectrum, from the X-ray down to the radio. At the heart of MS 0735.6+7421, there's a >10^10 solar mass black hole that appears to have been active for hundreds of millions of years, something unheard of!
Re: foxnews holes (Score:1)
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Oh please, as if Fox News could produce that much energy, then they'd be useful for something.
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I would argue with with duration and length of the ejected material that the galaxy BLOWS as much as Fox News
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Apparently this has been known since 2008. But remember, you read it first here on slashdot!
Still (Score:1, Insightful)
Still sucks less than your mum.
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You forgot the Bennett whatever-his-last-name-is dump.
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Don't give them any ideas. It's been a good while since we got bennettrolled.
The article is in serious need of editing (Score:1)
The article has 6 huge pictures without any caption explaining what we're looking at. That makes it closer to a desktop wallpaper collection than to an article.
Re:Puzzled (Score:5, Informative)
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Yes, if the attraction of McDonald's was so great that it pulled people towards it at a speed greater than the speed limit.
Re:Puzzled (Score:4, Funny)
it does seem to work like this, with bodies of larger mass being attracted to it with greater force!
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it does seem to work like this, with bodies of larger mass being attracted to it with greater force!
Jokes aside, you're perpetuating a false belief.
It should be well known by now that gravity does not accelerate heavier objects any faster than lighter objects. The mass of the bodies is irrelevant if non-zero.
Ref Gallileo's alleged demonstration at the tower of Pisa.
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Dude, you're the worse kind of pedant, the kind who is wrong.
It is indeed greater force (F = G * m_1 * m_2 / r^2)
Same acceleration due to /gravity/, but that's not actually what schlachter said.
Pop Quiz time: If you drop a 1 gram marble and a 1 gram feather, which one hits the ground first?
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The marble. Unless you are in a vacuum.
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The mass of the bodies is irrelevant if non-zero.
This isn't correct. Mass is relevant to acceleration by gravity, otherwise you'd fall at the same rate on the Moon as on Earth.
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I should have said that the mass of an attracted object is irrelevant if the attractor is stationary. Like, one presumes, said McD station was thought to be.
When the relative difference in mass between two objects go towards infinity, the amount of influence the mass of the lighter object has goes towards zero. The pull a car has on earth, an astronaut on the moon, or a star on a galactic center black hole is so small that for all purposes they can be disregarded, and the greater objects be considered sta
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I suspect my local McDs is traveling at 80% the speed of light!!! So I have to drive even faster than that to get to it!!
I just haven't found the right frame of reference in which I can prove it.
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Not at all, because that is not a special property of McDonalds. People get speeding tickets going anywhere and nowhere, McDonald's doesn't cause it.
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Yes, they do cause it, because they cause a fucking great accretion disk to form around them, and they provide some fucking massive magnetic fields to help fuel the accretion disk too. What's so fucking hard to understand about this? Oh, yes, that's right - nothing. You're either a troll, a moron or, most likely, both.
Fuck you, and fuck this website.
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People get speeding tickets going [...] nowhere
How did you manage that one?
Never mind, dumb question. I got a ticket once for failing to use my turn signal--while going straight.
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You can joy ride without having any destination in mind.
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So it's a bit like saying "McDonald's causes speeding tickets" because some people got speeding tickets on the way there?
Given the mass of their clients it stands to reason that there would be a gravitational anomaly causing cars to speed up the closer they get.
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IAAP, although not an expert in black holes.
Even though black holes have an event horizon through which nothing is supposed to escape, it has been predicted that black holes can emit Hawking radiation [wikipedia.org] at their event horizons, due to quantum effects.
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Somebody modded me down. Seriously? I'm just providing facts.
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Re:Puzzled (Score:4, Informative)
I never understood this. It is said that the black holes are black because not even light can escape them. And yet, they emit light? How does the light they emit escape?
No light escapes from the black hole. The radiation that we're detecting comes from matter in the accretion disk. A disk of gas and dust around the black hole way farther than the event horizon. This matter is heated and accelerated by the gravitational forces of the black hole. That's why they radiate. If this matter were inside the black hole's even horizon then yes we wouldn't be able to detect it cause once inside the event horizon there is no escape. It's all way down to the singularity with no hope of escaping.
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Very simplistic analogy:
You rip a sheet of paper, it makes noise. Once you finished with it, no noise would ever come out of it, but someone in the distance hears it and says "the guy made some noise while tearing some paper".
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due to time dilation, wouldn't those hundreds of millions of years (from our frame of reference) quoted in the summary be a much much shorter time window of from the reference from of the matter circling the black hole and emitting radiation just beyond it's event horizon? So that its' not the length of time that is unexpected, in some real sense, but the degree of time dilation? For all we know, it could have been a few moments of activity from that perspective.
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Black holes have massive gravitational and magnetic fields which do some rather violent things to matter that is near, but not in, the black hole. So while some stuff falls in, other stuff gets heated hot enough to emit x-rays, and some particles get ejected at tremendous speeds.
Anti-matter? (Score:2)
/. isn't your personal blog (Score:1)
I actually enjoy reading these well written pop science blogs, but seriously, does every single post have to be featured on Slashdot???
This isn't your personal blog outlet.
No more "Startswithabang" please, unless it's actually News!!
yay medium.com linkspam (Score:1)
now with extra wikipedia links to paper over the ugly spammishness a bit. yet no link in the summary to the "creatively interpreted" paper shamelessly ripped off for this bastard blog post.
Largest known? (Score:1)
The galaxy is about 2.6 light-years away. That's relatively close. That seems kind of a coincidental. A far away one would probably be detectable because it's so powerful.
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Try 2.6 billion light years!
From the article
"But 2.6 billion light years away, at the heart of galaxy cluster MS 0735.6+7421, the most powerful active galactic nucleus (AGN) ever discovered resides..."
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Sorry, that's what I meant. Still relatively close. The diameter of the observable universe is about 30 to 40 billion light years. The chance of the brightest radiation source being only 2.6 BLY away is close enough to suggest some kind of anthropic principle bias in play.
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lol. That's actually quite a long way off.
He is right, that is relatively close for a Universe-record setting entity. Since we can see out to about 13 billion light years, this is in the closest 1% of the observable universe.
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The observable universe is actually about 92 billion light years across (radius 45 billion).
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The light from the most distant objects we see has travelled about 13 billion light years to reach us. During the intervening 13 billion years, the expansion of the universe means that those objects would now be 46 billion light years away. So which number you use depends on how you want to define the size. I like the 13 billion number because it doesn't depend on any definition of simultaneity.
Source: http://www.space.com/24073-how... [space.com]
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Counting time from the Big Bang, it's also in about the last 20% of the development of the Universe. If this sort of thing needs a lot of time to form (and I don't know whether it would), the reason we don't see more distant ones may be that there hasn't been enough time for the light to reach us.
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That's indeed a plausible explanation for the apparent coincidence. Our view of the "recent" universe is essentially limited by the speed of light to a pretty small chunk of the entire universe. It's almost like being stuck with a cable service that plays mostly old reruns.
Re:Largest known? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd hate to be at just a mere 2.6 lightyears distance from an event that caused two volumes both 600000 lightyears across to be filled with hot, X-ray emitting gas.
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Then on 25 May 2018, we're dead. Because that's 2.6 years from now (I allowed for on Leap Year day).
And yes, I saw the post below this one...
good (Score:1)