'Monster' Black Hole Announced Last Week Is Nothing Special (syfy.com) 39
The Bad Astronomer writes: Last week, scientists announced the discovery of a stellar-mass black hole with 70 times the Sun's mass, far heftier than theory predicts they can get. Within days, though, four separate papers have come out casting extreme doubt on the claim. They show that the data wasn't processed correctly, and that the black hole is closer to Earth than first assumed, which changes the calculations and makes it a more normal 5 - 20 solar mass object.
Meow! Telescope fight! (Score:2)
Our observatory’s holes are bigger and 50 times as black.
Re: Meow! Telescope fight! (Score:2)
Re: Meow! Telescope fight! (Score:2)
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Funnily I've been playing with Space Engine lately, and had always kind of assumed that Sagittarius A was a lot "bigger" than it is, if you go find it. I've also gotten pretty good at finding it by eye without having to type it into the search feature of the program. It's pretty easy once you know what you're looking for, but it's harder than you'd think. You look at the pictures of the galaxy and it's easy to assume that the entire center of the thing i
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I imagine IRL anywhere around there is probably pretty inhospitable, but even the center of the galaxy is still pretty empty and most of the stars around there are just kind of doing their own thing and not terribly bothered by the beast in the middle of it all.
Well, aside from the stars being whipped around at appreciable fractions of the speed of light. [wikipedia.org] :)
Sagittarius is a fascinating constellation, as it contains the center of the galaxy. Which means there are tons of interesting objects to view int that area. No telescope is needed, just some dark skies. If you look at the "spout" of the teapot, it is pointing right at SagA*. it is right in the middle of a "dark" band in the milky way, a big dust lane that makes it hard to see through the galaxy in visible lig
Re: Meow! Telescope fight! (Score:5, Informative)
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" Also not black, just like, really dark blue but from this angle, it looks black."
If there is any color involved it would be red .
The intense gravity of the black hole slows down time, so the frequency of the radiation is red shifted.
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Lowering the frequency of a gamma ray does not make it "red" except by happenstance. The radiant glow of matter being destroyed by gravitaonal tides as it approaches a smaller black hole is high energy and intense, and yes, produces gamma rays. Gamma radiation also does not have "spectral lines". It's not generated by quantum effects of electron orbitals yielding photons of particular frequencies, it tends to be much broader spectrum. Even if matter-shredding generated X-0rays and gamma rays are red-shifte
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Thank you for nerd-splaining that you don't understand descriptions involving color.
Operator error (Score:2)
You really need take heed to the sticker that says "objects in mirror are closer than they appear".
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I know that what you wrote is humour, but ...
NGC stands for New General Catalogue [astronomy.com], nothing national about it, nor is it for galaxies only ... in fact, galaxies were not called that when the catalog was published.
I can see the news angle of this (Score:2)
Paper2: We are all going to die, there is nothing we can do, enjoy hedonism while you can, ignore Greta.
works as intended (Score:2)
sience, still working as intended.
somebody publishes his findings, others check and either confirm or point to mistakes & invalidate.
Proof scientists aren't perfect ! (Score:2)
So global warning is a hoax !
What ! It was scientists who found the mistake and corrected it? It wasn't just deniers denying it? I guess science works after all.
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There's a teensy weensy difference in data size, observational ability and error margin for something thats thousands of light years away and effectively invisible, vs something thats happening all around us in technicolor.
But yeah, apart from that good call.
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If somebody told you a warning was "science," that was the hoax right there.
Warnings are "public safety." They have more to do with directing traffic than with science.
Anybody that tells you they received a "global warning" is full of shit and you should ask them what authority actually issued the warning.
There there, it's ok. (Score:2)
newsflash! (Score:2)
huh? (Score:2)
"a stellar-mass black hole with 70 times the Sun's mass" ... isn't a stellar-mass black hole.
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"a stellar-mass black hole with 70 times the Sun's mass" ... isn't a stellar-mass black hole.
Try multiplying your comprehension by 70.
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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary ... (Score:1)
... evidence.
If you are going to publish a "wow how could this be possible, we wouldn't believe it if we hadn't measured it ourselves" type paper, you really should either get someone else to reproduce your work before you publish AND deliberately look for alternative, more plausible explanations for the data, or publish with a big caveat that "this needs to be reproduced before it is widely accepted, we acknowledge that we might have made a mistake that we did not see or that we may have failed to consider
Better performance (Score:4, Funny)
No wonder (Score:2)
People don't believe scientists when every week there is a retraction on what was published. One week something is good for you and the next week it causes you to drop dead. Like the continuous stories from NASA promising something big that turn out to be something we already know.
Oh, well! (Score:2)
Not so huge, if true.
Black Hole Deniers (Score:2)