Into the Abyss

The black hole, which scientists said is 6.5 billion times more massive than the sun and spins clockwise,.....


What if we look at it from the other side? Is it still clockwise?
 
Unit74 said:
The black hole, which scientists said is 6.5 billion times more massive than the sun and spins clockwise,.....


What if we look at it from the other side? Is it still clockwise?
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Yes. It isn’t a relativity issue.
 
So maybe I’m a little dense - but can someone explain why Relativity predicts a black hole when mere Newtonian physics does not? It seems to me that a black hole is viable under either system.

Agree that an image is very cool.
 
How do we know which side we are looking at?
 
benyflyguy said:
pretty cool to get a true pic
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IK04 said:
FAKE. It's a photo of the "ding, fries are done." light on a toaster oven.
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bflynn said:
Agree that an image is very cool.
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This is POA, so I must nit-pick. It is not a photo, it is an image derived from radio waves received over several days from six different radio telescopes around the world. Nevertheless, it is cool, as other have said.

From National Geographic:

“For several days, the team observed M87 in short radio wavelengths, because radio waves can pierce the murky shrouds of dust and gas surrounding galactic centers. During that observing run, which also included targets other than M87, the team gathered so much data -- five petabytes—that the only reasonable way to transfer it was by shipping actual hard drives, rather than sending it digitally.”
 
Given the distance and time dilation what we're seeing "then" probably doesn't even resemble it "now"
 
I just looked at Google for the first time today and see that they are featuring this. To be honest, at first I thought they were celebrated the invention of the donut.

download.png
 
From National Geographic:

“For several days, the team observed M87 in short radio wavelengths, because radio waves can pierce the murky shrouds of dust and gas surrounding galactic centers. During that observing run, which also included targets other than M87, the team gathered so much data -- five petabytes—that the only reasonable way to transfer it was by shipping actual hard drives, rather than sending it digitally.”

Hah! the old "sneaker-net" lives on!

-Skip
 
Solar system to scale, courtesy of XKCD:
aCpZoWI.png
 
SoonerAviator said:
Southern side, it’s rotating clockwise. It rotates counterclockwise if you look at it from the Northern side.
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Is there a north and south in space. Thought that only applied to our world's magnetic fields.
 
Meh, see those all the time at the donut store. That one’s called “honey-glazed”.
Never seen such excitement over the ‘missing part’ of a donut.
 
bflynn said:
So maybe I’m a little dense - but can someone explain why Relativity predicts a black hole when mere Newtonian physics does not? It seems to me that a black hole is viable under either system.
Click to expand...

General Relativity is the theory that predicts how light bends in the presence of mass, because of the curvature of spacetime caused by the mass's presence. So the whole "event horizon" thing, and "gravity so strong not even light can escape" thing, are only possible with Relativity.
 
kath said:
General Relativity is the theory that predicts how light bends in the presence of mass, because of the curvature of spacetime caused by the mass's presence. So the whole "event horizon" thing, and "gravity so strong not even light can escape" thing, are only possible with Relativity.
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You've obviously never used a bottle of tequila in place of milk for your Froot Loops.
 
kath said:
General Relativity is the theory that predicts how light bends in the presence of mass, because of the curvature of spacetime caused by the mass's presence. So the whole "event horizon" thing, and "gravity so strong not even light can escape" thing, are only possible with Relativity.
Click to expand...
Soooo.....


What your saying is that this whole black hole thing basically mimics marriage?
 
So where do all the planets, stars, space junk etc. end up once they're sucked into the black hole? Is it like a big trash compactor? Do they get transported back to 1400 BC? Does NASA need another 100 billion dollars to find out?
 
Brad Smith said:
So where do all the planets, stars, space junk etc. end up once they're sucked into the black hole? Is it like a big trash compactor? Do they get transported back to 1400 BC? Does NASA need another 100 billion dollars to find out?
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Waiting for Eman to chime in on this one.....
 
Brad Smith said:
So where do all the planets, stars, space junk etc. end up once they're sucked into the black hole? Is it like a big trash compactor? Do they get transported back to 1400 BC? Does NASA need another 100 billion dollars to find out?
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So there's actually a metric crap ton of space inside an atom. The electrons orbit around a nucleus composed of protons and (except for H) neutrons, and the electrons being negatively charged should bind up against the nucleus but they don't due to one of the fundamental forces (I forget if it's the strong/weak/nuclear force). Anyway inside a black hole the gravitation forces are so strong that they overcome the fundamental force(s) and compress every single atom eliminating all the space in them.

If the earth was compressed in such a manner it would be the size of an orange. It would still have the same mass, the moon would still orbit it like it does, but it would be the size of an orange. So everything that gets sucked into a black hole gets compressed down to a (relatively) crazy small clump of mass. How small depends on the black hole.

But the black hole we "see" is really only the Schwarzchild radius. That's the point at which you can't escape the gravity of a black hole - which is actually quite a bit bigger than the compressed matter at the core. Of course, having never been to the core of a black hole we don't exactly know how matter (or space or time) behaves or exists there at the singularity.
 
EdFred said:
Of course, having never been to the core of a black hole we don't exactly know how matter (or space or time) behaves or exists there at the singularity
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This last line of your post is where I'm at. It's all just theory until it's proven. While the actual discovery and "picture" of the black hole is interesting, it's nothing more than an amusement for the majority of earth dwellers.
 
Brad Smith said:
This last line of your post is where I'm at. It's all just theory until it's proven. While the actual discovery and "picture" of the black hole is interesting, it's nothing more than an amusement for the majority of earth dwellers.
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I speculate that some supermassive black holes rip the fabric of space time, and jettison all the mass into a new universe. Like blowing up a balloon from another balloon. But since space and time is so warped, the universes co-exist with matter and time existing in both of them simultaneously - or as simultaneous as possible since frame references for each universe would be completely different.
 
So its a giant shrinking machine with a bunch of oranges in it....sheesh the scientists could have just told us that instead...and it doesn't sound so ominous either.

Okay so with all the shrunk planets and stars inside it.....are there even tinier black holes inside :)
 
EdFred said:
So there's actually a metric crap ton of space inside an atom. The electrons orbit around a nucleus composed of protons and (except for H) neutrons, and the electrons being negatively charged should bind up against the nucleus but they don't due to one of the fundamental forces (I forget if it's the strong/weak/nuclear force). Anyway inside a black hole the gravitation forces are so strong that they overcome the fundamental force(s) and compress every single atom eliminating all the space in them.

If the earth was compressed in such a manner it would be the size of an orange. It would still have the same mass, the moon would still orbit it like it does, but it would be the size of an orange. So everything that gets sucked into a black hole gets compressed down to a (relatively) crazy small clump of mass. How small depends on the black hole.

But the black hole we "see" is really only the Schwarzchild radius. That's the point at which you can't escape the gravity of a black hole - which is actually quite a bit bigger than the compressed matter at the core. Of course, having never been to the core of a black hole we don't exactly know how matter (or space or time) behaves or exists there at the singularity.
Click to expand...

I agree about how great the gravity of a black hole is, but I hadn't heard about the compression theory. What I've heard is that the gravity gradient of a black hole is so great that the object is torn to pieces as it approaches the black hole because the gravity pulls on the object much harder on the closest piece than on the farthest piece, and by the time the matter makes it into the black hole, it has been dissociated into its fundamental sub-atomic particles, so there is no way to identify the object that just fell into the black hole.
 
Brad Smith said:
This last line of your post is where I'm at. It's all just theory until it's proven.
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Relativity (both Special and General) has been *very* well tested experimentally. There's a long history of testing it, from observations of starlight bending around the Sun during a solar eclipse in 1919, to the Gravity Probe B spacecraft, observation of Gravitational Lensing, to the observation of Gravitational Waves by LIGO in 2015. In all of these tests, observations have matched what the theory predicted.

GPS technology would not work without correction factors based on this theory. This is because GPS satellites orbit the earth in earth's gravitational field, so understanding how (for instance) clocks slow down onboard a spacecraft that is a) moving and b) in a gravity field become important. These are relativistic effects that are quite real and can be calculated mathematically. So we are all trusting our lives to this theory, on a regular basis. It's as solid as science gets.

Doesn't mean there isn't still more to learn, or that the theory might break down in extreme environments (such as black holes) in a way that we don't understand yet. But "all just a theory" is too dismissive to be applied to something like Relativity.
Sorry if this comes off as punchy, but I'm reminded often that we (scientists) don't often do a very good job of communicating how we know what we know, or even using words like "theory" consistently among ourselves.
Well, off to my astronomy lecture...

Edit: for a good time, google the word "spaghettification". It describes what would happen to you if you fall into a Black Hole. :)
 
That is now believed to be made up of two new elements not known to exist before this discovery. Bu and Ng.

Henceforth known as, the BuNg hole.
 
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