Astronomers from Caltech have reported that they've observed a collision between two black holes. Normally such an event is invisible, but this time a more massive black hole sitting nearby helped illuminate the other two as they collided. If confirmed, the findings, published in Physical Review Letters , would be the first optical observations ever made of a black hole merger.
What happened: First detected in May 2019 and dubbed S190521g, the merger happened about 4 billion light-years away, within the vicinity of a supermassive black hole called J1249+3449. This object is 100 million times more massive than the sun, with a diameter roughly the size of Earth's orbit around the sun.
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Black holes could (theoretically) provide infinite energy if they're fed
Space might be where most powerful and just about limitless repositories of energy are lurking. We just don't know how to harness it yet.
Black holes are kind of like dragons guarding their lairs full of treasure. Sure, they'll give you that thing you're looking for—but they always want something in return. Say you were able to snare escaped energy from a black hole (they supposedly don't devour everything). What the black hole would require as payment is a gargantuan amount of energy, because otherwise, it would evaporate into the void over billions of years.
Could we extract energy from a black hole? Our experiment verifies old theory
Daniele Faccio receives funding from EPSRC, the Royal Academy of Engineering and EU Horizons 2020
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A rotating black hole is such an extreme force of nature that it drags surrounding time and space around with it. So it is only natural to ask whether black holes could be used as some sort of energy source. In 1969, mathematical physicist Roger Penrose proposed a method to do just this, now known as the " Penrose Process ".
The method could be used by sophisticated civilisations (aliens or future humans) to harvest energy by making "black hole bombs". Some of the physics required to do so, however, had never been experimentally verified – until now. Our study confirming the underlying physics has just been published in Nature Physics .
Monster black hole found in the early universe: The second-most distant quasar ever discovered
Astronomers have discovered the second-most distant quasar ever found using three Maunakea Observatories in Hawai'i: W. M. Keck Observatory, the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF's NOIRLab, and the University of Hawai'i-owned United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT). It is the first quasar to receive an indigenous Hawaiian name, Poniua'ena, which means "unseen spinning source of creation, surrounded with brilliance" in the Hawaiian language.
Poniua'ena is only the second quasar yet detected at a distance calculated at a cosmological redshift greater than 7.5 and it hosts a black hole twice as large as the other quasar known in the same era. The existence of these massive black holes at such early times challenges current theories of how supermassive black holes formed and grew in the young universe.
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Mark Davis: You think I want to sell advertising on Black Hole seats? - ProFootballTalk
His son, current Raiders owner Mark Davis, voted against the league’s plan to turn the lower rows of seats closest to the field in every stadium into advertising opportunities. The Raiders were the only team to oppose the measure with Davis expressing his misgivings during the virtual meeting last week.
"I can't imagine telling one fan they cannot attend the opening game of our inaugural season in Las Vegas at the most magnificent stadium that they helped to build. Let alone tell 3,500 fans that their seats are gone for the entire season," Davis told Vincent Bonsignore of the Las Vegas Review-Journal . "Those seats in the front rows are some of our most ardent fans, including members of the famed Black Hole . You think I want to sell advertising on their seats?"
Black Hole Eruption Is a Pretty Big Bang – Now. Powered by Northrop Grumman
Astronomers using a combination of space-based and Earth-based telescopes have spotted the aftermath of the largest known cosmic outburst since the original Big Bang that formed the universe as we know it some 14 billion years ago.
The blast, reports NASA , is due to a black hole eruption in a galaxy cluster some 390 million light-years from Earth, in the direction of the far-northern constellation Ophiuchus.
How big was this eruption? Big enough to punch though the sheet of hot gas that stretches across the Ophiuchus cluster — leaving a gap more than a million light-years across. The blast, says EarthSky , was five times more powerful than the previous cosmic record holder, another black hole eruption designated MS 0735+74.
Iowa astrophysicist observes black hole's outburst | Iowa Now
A University of Iowa astrophysicist is part of an international team that has observed a black hole hurling hot material into space at close to the speed of light.
The flare-up between the black hole and a companion star make up a system called MAXI J1820+070, located in the Milky Way galaxy, about 10,000 light years from Earth. The scientists working with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory found that while some of the hot gas from the companion star will cross the "event horizon" (the point of no return) and fall into the black hole, some of it is blasted away from the black hole in a pair of short beams of material, or jets.
The Monster Black Hole at the Beginning of the Universe --"Unseen Spinning Source of
Home » Black Holes » The Monster Black Hole at the Beginning of the Universe –“Unseen Spinning Source of Creation”
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When the iconic black hole the size of our Solar System at the center of Galaxy M87 was imaged in 2019, astronomers described it as witnessing the “gates of Hell and the end of spacetime.
“How can the universe produce such a massive black hole so early in its history?” said Xiaohui Fan, Regents’ professor and associate department head of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Arizona about current theory that holds the growth of the first giant black holes started during the Epoch of Reionization, beginning about 400 million years after the Big Bang.
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Absolutely magnificent. 🌌 Centaurus A—an elliptical galaxy made up of dust + gas about 12 million light-years away—… https://t.co/lV3Dmz8bKm AdlerPlanet (from Chicago, Illinois) Mon Jun 29 04:03:07 +0000 2020
#ICYMI, you can take a trip to the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole thanks to @chandraxray. Watch to exp… https://t.co/o82g3hzYG2 NASAUniverse (from Greenbelt, MD) Mon Jun 22 19:07:16 +0000 2020
Intermediate-mass black holes split the difference between puny black holes (<~100 solar masses) and supermassive b… https://t.co/p0TdB81b4j AstronomyMag (from Our tiny corner of the cosmos) Sun Jun 28 23:30:15 +0000 2020
If confirmed, this would be the first optical observations ever made of a black hole merger. https://t.co/xrCOCGoEPX techreview (from Cambridge, MA) Sat Jun 27 01:10:30 +0000 2020
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