Telescopes Detect 'Biggest Explosion Since Big Bang' (bbc.com) 75
Scientists have detected evidence of a colossal explosion in space -- five times bigger than anything observed before. A reader shares a report: The huge release of energy is thought to have emanated from a supermassive black hole some 390 million light years from Earth. The eruption is said to have left a giant dent in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster. Researchers reported their findings [PDF] in The Astrophysical Journal. "I've tried to put this explosion into human terms and it's really, really difficult," co-author Melanie Johnston-Hollitt told BBC News. "The best I can do is tell you that if this explosion continued to occur over the 240 million years of the outburst -- which it probably didn't, but anyway -- it'd be like setting off 20 billion, billion megaton TNT explosions every thousandth of a second for the entire 240 million years. So that's incomprehensibly big. Huge."
20 billion, billion megaton TNT (Score:2)
Re:20 billion, billion megaton TNT (Score:5, Interesting)
This explosion is notable mainly because it lasted so long. But much more intense events have been observed.
In Sept 2015 astronomers observed the collision of two 30 solar mass black holes. During the final 20 milliseconds, three solar masses of energy were radiated as gravitation waves, which is 50 times the total output power of all the other stars in the observable universe.
Of course, that intensity only lasted for 0.02 seconds rather than 240 million years, but still ...
Re:20 billion, billion megaton TNT (Score:5, Informative)
During the final 20 milliseconds, three solar masses of energy were radiated as gravitation waves, which is 50 times the total output power of all the other stars in the observable universe.
Of course, that intensity only lasted for 0.02 seconds rather than 240 million years, but still ...
Solar masses is a good unit here. 5e54j is around 30 million solar masses of mass-energy. I cannot comprehend that.
But 24 years (average) to emit the same energy as the black hole merger.
Kind of slow. Like when I learned that the average power density of the Sun is about the same as a compost heap. Which I suppose explains how it can last billions of years.
Re:20 billion, billion megaton TNT (Score:4, Informative)
We tend to think of the primary energy source in the universe as stellar fusion, because we see with light, but it's really not. Energy from gravitational collapse completely dominates, it's just mostly in gravity waves and neutrinos, and very bursty. Fusion lasts a long time, as you say because it's slow.
Re: 20 billion, billion megaton TNT (Score:2)
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And the measures of density are in Trump's. For instance, Sagittarius A is only roughly 1/30th as dense as Donald Trump.
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"legitimate" civilian mass-murder. (Score:2)
Literally ONLY in Murica.
Go tell that to the mutating babies whose crispy-black skin literally fell off, you complete piece of shit.
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Biggest, but not best (Score:5, Funny)
The best bang since the big one remains Eccentrica Gallumbits...
Funny, how you see sexual attraction as hateful. (Score:2)
So, do you hate and discriminate against everyone you like to fuck, or why would your mind instantly go there and link those two?
Cause our minds didn't.
Or are you just a hateful sexist prejudiced bully?
Re:Biggest, but not best (Score:4, Informative)
:(
It was Zapoh Beeblebrox who was described as the best bang since the big one (by Eccentrica Gallumbits).
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Biggest, but not best (Score:4, Informative)
^ incorrect
It's Zaphod.
So... what they are saying is... (Score:3)
There is a force strong enough to escape a black-hole... by totally ripping it apart! Like a galactic fart! Or a universal fart as a supermassive might exceed the size of a galaxy... the scale is so big how would we define such a fart? This has to be bigger than the elephant that lifted dad up!
Well Hawking radiation escapes so we kinda already knew somethings escaped. Would that be lady fart Hawking Radiation?
And they say... nothing escapes a black hole... not even light... well except farts... those escape even the most massive of bodies!!!
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Well Hawking radiation escapes so we kinda already knew somethings escaped.
1. Hawking Radiation is a theoretical prediction that has never been observed.
2. The Hawking Radiation from a one solar mass black hole would be equal to emitting one electron every 3 million years. The bigger the black hole, the weaker the radiation.
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1. Hawking Radiation is a theoretical prediction that has never been observed
The theoretical basis for Hawking radiation is very solid, though. I don't think any physicist believes black holes are at absolute zero now. The mechanism is perhaps debatable, but not the core idea that black holes have temperature.
How incredibly long it will take even small black holes to decay drives home just how early we are in the lifetime of the universe. Unless the Big Rip comes sooner than expected (and that's a debatable fate, to be sure), we're in the first epoch that could support life (as we
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>then the rest of time will just be decaying black holes.
Then the last black hole will decay to nothing and all that is left is photons - no matter - no gravity. Without the gravity the space of the universe becomes scale independent and is equivalent to the low entropy start of the big bang. So it starts over.
That's what Roger told me anyway. Seems legit.
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It can't start over unless the universe collapses back into a singularity (not going to happen) or pops out of existence and another universe forms in its place within the bulk. The big bang wasn't an explosion, it was/is an expansion of the entire universe and space-time itself.
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He's referring to Penrose's Cyclic Cosmology. I'm noy sure that Penrose believes it himself, but the theoretical basis does make sense (with a couple caveats). If there are no massive particles left in the universe, then the universe ceases to have scale, and there's no difference between a massively expanded universe and a singularity. The math works, anyhow, though it depends on proton decay, and a bit of hand-waving about neutrinos.
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He's smarter than I am and I like the theory for its internal consistency. I read his book a few years ago so I must be some kind of expert.
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I really liked his book. Mostly, I like the fact that someone is thinking big, and not just iterating on the consensus view. Cosmology, of all disciplines, needs people who think big.
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But photons do have mass, just not rest mass. Anything that carries energy has mass.
OTOH, ISTM these photons would become uniformly distributed in locations and uniform in energy level (frequency) over enough time. (Unless the universe isn't within it's own Schwarzschild radius.)
That said, this doesn't account for either dark energy or dark matter. Which would require more understanding than we currently have. But if dark matter doesn't decay, then the photons wouldn't become uniformly distributed. And
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Supermassive black hole decay is the one and only time you get to use 'googolyears' as a serious unit.
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And they say... nothing escapes a black hole... not even light... well except farts... those escape even the most massive of bodies!!!
Like Roseanne Barr?
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If ever there was a measure of how far Slashdot has fallen intellectually, it must surely be the fact someone just use the word fart about 20 times in a single post in a woefully ineffectual attempt at being funny.
Your post audience must surely be people with an IQ of about 20. That's definitely not the IQ of the average Slashdot of yesteryear.
Re: So... what they are saying is... (Score:3)
Or are you saying that high IQ individuals are required to be restricted from occasionally observing, enjoying or participating in low-brow humor?
If that were true, the entire Monty Python catalog would have been declared illegal decades ago!
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Nah. That just means he's (almost certainly a male) in his late teenage years or possibly early 20's. It doesn't have much to do with intellectual skills, only social ones. And typical slashdot posters have always been deficient in that. (Look up the "hot grits" threads, e.g.)
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Nah. That just means he's (almost certainly a male) in his late teenage years or possibly early 20's. It doesn't have much to do with intellectual skills, only social ones. And typical slashdot posters have always been deficient in that. (Look up the "hot grits" threads, e.g.)
Hot grits. Holy cow, what a callback to The Good Old Days(tm).
Well, it's the "average Amrerican" you wanted. (Score:2)
... you always wanted.
By implying people are retarded, until they succumbed, and now actually are.
Have fun; we'll be reclaiming the wasteland in 50 years. :)
Impressive on a human scale (Score:5, Funny)
From the paper, the energy released was 5E+61 ergs, or 5E+54 Joules.
Incredibly, this amount of energy is equal to TWO roundhouse kicks to the face from Chuck Norris.
Re: Impressive on a human scale (Score:1)
Re:Impressive on a human scale (Score:4, Funny)
Who the fuck is Chick Norris?
Well now we know the name he'll choose if he ever transitions.
Units! (Score:5, Informative)
"20 billion, billion megaton TNT explosions every thousandth of a second"
a megaton of TNT is 4.184Ã--10^15 J. A watt is 1J/s. So, this is 20 * 10^9 * 10^9 * 10^15 joules of energy every 1/1000s, or 2*10^37J/s -- watts.
"The Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Arizona is the largest nuclear power plant in the United States, [... with a] generating capacity of about 3,937 MW."
This is 2*10^37W / (3.937 * 10^9W), or 5 * 10^27 of the largest nuclear power stations in the US.
The sun outputs 384.6 yotta watts (3.846Ã--10^26 watts). Then, this celestial body is pumping out energy at a rate 10^11 times as strong as our sun. We're at a radius about 93,000,000 miles, so to be in this body's comfort zone, we'd have to be .. 4.85*10^13 miles away? "Pluto's average distance from the Sun is 3,670,050,000 miles" -- My, what balmy weather Pluto would be having!
"The closest known galaxy to us is the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, at 236,000,000,000,000,000 km" This amounts to 1.45*10^17 mi. That extra 15 000 from the ideal position of the habitable zone doesn't seem to bad.. if we were in the Canis Major dwarf galaxy, and this object were at the center of the Milky Way, perhaps much of the galaxy next door to us would be in the Goldilocks zone!
Anyway, 2*10^37J/s. The sun is expected to output 10^44J of energy in its lifetime. Then, if the sun were burning with so much energy output, it would last about 5*10^6 seconds. About two months.
If you converted the entire moon to energy, you would get approximately 10^39 J. In two minutes, this celestial event will have output as much energy as if you converted the moon from matter to energy.
So, who says it's difficult to put into knowable terms how much energy this is? (Geesh.. these terms don't really make sense.)
Obligatory (Score:1)
Talk about getting mooned.
What about the Libraries-of-Congresses-to-matter metric?
Re: Obligatory (Score:2)
I can't answer that, but if you laid a hundred Olympic sized swimming pools end to end it would be a pretty pointless (and wasteful) exercise.
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Actually it's named after the British empire, not Roman.
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“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The trippy part... (Score:5, Informative)
...is that this could have happened in our galaxy 100,000 years ago and it might be we find out tomorro-
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The universe is not a safe place.
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Might I, along with the theist who proposed the Big Bang, suggest a more "heavenly" permutation of the multiverse?
Yes, I know. Shameless plug.
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Lemaitre also counseled that to treat the Big Bang as G-d's creation was wrong. Learn to read history before misusing it.
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Sorry to hear he had a weakness of self-contradiction in that manner. Still, a strong scientific achievement on what -is- God's creation.
Also, cite.
Uses affirming "is"... (Score:2)
...expects evidence from the opponent.
You religidiots are so comedically incompetent at arguing and over-confident at the same time, that it's hilarious. :D
Call us when you have something to back up that "is" for your "God". And stop raping children.
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You didn't ask, did you?
Evidence.
NDE phenomena [thelancet.com]
Fine Tuned Universe [wikipedia.org]
Statistical improbability of prophecy [christinprophecy.org]
Irreducible Complexity, i.e. stepwise survivability [evolutionnews.org]
Historical accounts [theguardian.com]
EAAN (incoherence of naturalism in conjunction with evolution) [wikipedia.org]
No, goalpost-shifting to "proof" won't make it stop being evidence. As is always the case with everything everywhere, proposing an alternate explanation won't make it stop being evidence either.
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The universe is not a safe place.
According to some, it's not even a good idea!
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...is that this could have happened in our galaxy 100,000 years ago and it might be we find out tomorro-
Ha! This is why I still /., funny post, yet properly modded informative. Kudos to all.
Seems like (Score:4, Interesting)
A Conjoiner drive exploding.
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I wonder who she was...
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Talk about orgasmic
But there could be (Score:2)
bigger explosions that we haven't seen yet because they happened further away from us
Obviously (Score:1)
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Does your mother know you are using such language? You being a teenager, I think she'd be unapproving.
Maybe he didn't get abused as a child. (Score:2)
Cause he didn't have Catholiban parents.
Unlike you.
Incomprehensible? (Score:2)
"The best I can do is tell you that if this explosion continued to occur over the 240 million years of the outburst -- which it probably didn't, but anyway -- it'd be like setting off 20 billion, billion megaton TNT explosions every thousandth of a second for the entire 240 million years."
Oh, I get it!
"So that's incomprehensibly big. Huge."
No, I get it. "It probably didn't."
The biggest since the Big Bang - Really ? (Score:1)
All we know is it's the biggest we've seen so far, unless someone's calculated the maximum possible post-Big-Bang explosion and this is it. Which I doubt.
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All we know is it's the biggest we've seen so far, unless someone's calculated the maximum possible post-Big-Bang explosion and this is it. Which I doubt.
Yes that is true, though this has the interesting property that the larger they are, the more likely we are to see them.
Power of the Observable Universe For Two Months (Score:2)
The energy to make the Ophiuchus Concavity is 5*10^61 ergs according to the paper. The average energy output of the entire Observable Universe is estimated at 10,000 FOE/sec where a "FOE" is astrophysicist shorthand for 10^51 ergs (ten to the Fifty One Ergs - FOE) and is about equal to the output of one supernova. So it is 10^55 ergs/sec. It takes the Observable Universe two months to put out this much energy.
But how many football fields is it? (Score:2)
Surely every large number can be made more explicable by measuring it in terms of football fields.
TV show is more real. (Score:1)