Supermassive Black Hole Spaghettifies Star

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF


S&F on this one, makes me wonder how many years ago the possibility of life on a planet that orbited this star ended, assuming that was possible.

originally posted by: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

There is a black hole at the center of the Milky Way. If a star goes in and the x-ray center is aimed directly at us… that is really scary!

The x-rays blasts you speak of do happen but they emanate from the poles of the black hole so there is no chance of Earth ending up in the path of the jet. I also believe these energy jets are typically only observed to happen in older elliptical galaxies and seldom if ever seen in a young barred spiral like the milky way.

Great post OP, and not trying to be a know-it-all, just wanted to share in the discussion.

a reply to: carewemust

You're talking about the film Interstellar. The plot included a Einstein-Rosen bridge aka a wormhole. If i'm not mistaken that's essentially the path from the 'black hole' to the 'white hole'.

a reply to: Voiceofthemajority

Thanks for stating what I was trying to say! Noticed it late but did not clarify what I meant and did not mean to mislead anybody. Just saying the x-rays CAN be aimed at you if the black hole center is as well. I guess I was not clear enough and figured ya'll knew what I meant.

Mea culpa.

Yeah mate, you're right about that movie I went to the cinema to watch it a few years ago. It was terribly boring to begin with but quickly accelerated into a really good film. He did get sucked into a black hole and was trapped in another dimension, where he could see his daughter. Because his ship was travelling at close to the speed of light a lot more time had elapsed on earth than in his time frame. Relativity and all that...

Thanks for reminding me about that film proobably worth a download. At least that way I can skip the first hour of it.

Kudos to the op too, very interesting thread. Imangine witnessing something like that. What would it sound like or can you not hear anything in the vacuum of space? Like someone said previously, glad we're a safe distance away, like 3.5 light years away sort a safe.

MalacodaX

originally posted by: MalacodaX
Like someone said previously, glad we're a safe distance away, like 3.5 light years away sort a safe.

3.5 light years away from a supernova or this phenomenon is NOT a safe distance. With an ordinary supernova, even a distance of 130 light years there could be noticeable climactic changes on Earth, but with one this powerful (way more powerful than an ordinary supernova), I think anything less than a distance of 100 light years could have a good chance of causing serious problems, though that also depends on whether there are "jets" of particles or radiation emitted and in what direction. There was some discussion about those earlier in the thread, and they can be so powerful they have been known to wreak havoc on even other galaxies 20,000 light years distant so even 20,000 light years away might not be a safe distance from those types of jets.

Fortunately the OP phenomenon is way more than 3.5 light years away, more than 100 light years away, and even more than 20,000 light years away, way more, so yes we are safe from that, but we are not completely safe from supernova threats. There are a few that could happen which could strip the ozone layer from Earth which would allow too much UV to reach the surface and cause a lot of UV damage to life, possibly lethal. If you want to read about those, here is a link:

Near-Earth supernova

It is estimated that a Type II supernova closer than eight parsecs (26 light-years) would destroy more than half of the Earth's ozone layer.

So no, 3.5 light years would not be a safe distance from a supernova, as it would destroy the entire ozone layer.

a reply to: Voiceofthemajority

Reading up on supermassive black holes especially the one at the center of the Milky Way.

They estimate it to be 17 light-hours across! It is one million times the mass of our sun while the one from the OP is 400 million times the mass of the sun! That is really hard to wrap your mind around.

That would be light days across! These sizes are hard to imagine which makes the video even more mind bending.

Wikipedia: Supermassive Black Hole

PS - We are 26,000 light years away in the plane of the Milky Way so that is good!

The flash had, in fact, come from the middle of that distant galaxy, and further analysis suggested that the observations fit what is known about stars being caught in a black hole's gravitational tide.

The reason such an event, producing such a bright flash, is so rare is that two conditions must be met for it to occur: The star must stray close enough to the black hole to cross its "event horizon" -- the point at which it cannot escape the pull of the giant mass -- but the light produced in its destruction must somehow escape the black hole's all-consuming gravity. And for these conditions to occur, the galaxy's central black hole, which is immense even by black-hole standards, must be rotating at a relativistic speed -- close to the speed of light.

Observing the light over several months, the team came to the conclusion that the best explanation for the unusual flash of light was, indeed, the destruction of a star caught in the gravitational tides of an exceptionally massive black hole rotating extremely rapidly.

ScienceDaily.com - A super flash from a star and a supermassive black hole.

Now try and imagine all of this! A supermassive black, spinning close to the speed of light, takes a strand of a star and whips it around itself so fast that it crosses back over itself nearly two times round (!!!) then ignites in a massive flash.

My mind still has problems with the size of the supermassive black hole portion but to add in spinning at the near the speed of light... *poof*