Two Different Black Hole Articles: BH Devours Star and Hyperspace Travel

On Nov. 22, 2014, astronomers spotted a rare event in the night sky: A supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy, nearly 300 million light years from Earth, ripping apart a passing star. The event, known as a tidal disruption flare, for the black hole's massive tidal pull that tears a star apart, created a burst of X-ray activity near the center of the galaxy. Since then, a host of observatories have trained their sights on the event, in hopes of learning more about how black holes feed.

Now researchers at MIT and elsewhere have pored through data from multiple telescopes' observations of the event, and discovered a curiously intense, stable, and periodic pulse, or signal, of X-rays, across all datasets. The signal appears to emanate from an area very close to the black hole's event horizon—the point beyond which material is swallowed inescapably by the black hole. The signal appears to periodically brighten and fade every 131 seconds, and persists over at least 450 days.

The researchers believe that whatever is emitting the periodic signal must be orbiting the black hole, just outside the event horizon, near the Innermost Stable Circular Orbit, or ISCO—the smallest orbit in which a particle can safely travel around a black hole.

phys.org, Jan. 9, 2019 - X-ray pulse detected near event horizon as black hole devours star.

What she discovered is that under all conditions an object falling into a rotating black hole would not experience infinitely large effects upon passage through the hole's so-called inner horizon singularity. This is the singularity that an object entering a rotating black hole cannot maneuver around or avoid. Not only that, under the right circumstances, these effects may be negligibly small, allowing for a rather comfortable passage through the singularity. In fact, there may no noticeable effects on the falling object at all. This increases the feasibility of using large, rotating black holes as portals for hyperspace travel.

Also at phys.org: Rotating black holes may serve as gentle portals for hyperspace travel.

Black holes are weird and strange things. I think these two articles exemplify this statement!

The first is rather interesting because they go on to ponder that a white dwarf is sitting just outside the even horizon and rotating around the supermassive black hole (SMBH). A star passing too close was devoured and the white dwarf passed through the remnants and sparked off x-rays which caused the periodic emissions that were detected.

If that were not enough BH news, SMBH have been simulated and when there is no other material, one can traverse one of the singularity points (I did not see mention of the central singularity, so please correct me if I am wrong), without spaghetti-fying yourself or your ship! Just like in the 1979 Disney classic, The Black Hole!! Although I find it hard to go from one speed to 50% the speed of light in less than a second without some kind of physical stress on man or ship!

I think that both of these articles cover the spectrum of BH lore! Science and a little science fiction for the heck of it!

Black holes are cool!



Disclosure: One of my first threads was about another All Sky Survey capturing another star being eaten by a SMBH. In a few years, and a bunch of reading, these things are truly one of the strangest items universe has to offer! It is still fun reading!

Thanks, good topic, was just thinking about the relation to both today.

In particular,

If that were not enough BH news, SMBH have been simulated and when there is no other material, one can traverse one of the singularity points (I did not see mention of the central singularity, so please correct me if I am wrong), without spaghetti-fying yourself or your ship! Just like in the 1979 Disney classic, The Black Hole!! Although I find it hard to go from one speed to 50% the speed of light in less than a second without some kind of physical stress on man or ship!

Anti gravity(if that's what would do it), or other means to protect the physical stress on the ships?

Observational evidence indicates that all or nearly all massive galaxies contain a supermassive black hole, located at the galaxy's center. In the case of the Milky Way, the supermassive black hole corresponds to the location of Sagittarius A* at the Galactic Core.

Wikipedia: Supermassive Black Hole.

You will usually see it in science articles written as "Sgr A*" and when read out loud you would say, "Sagittarius A star".

This becomes important because sometime this year Project Event Horizon is supposed to release the first photograph of Sgr A*'s event horizon.

There will be a pop quiz on Friday!! Bring your No. 2 pencils!

a reply to: dreamingawake


Or a gravity shield.

There was Coast 2 Coast where a guy in the desert reported seeing a silver UFO dripping silver off of its surface. IIRC, turned out to be mercury. Before my buddy could tell me "the rest of the story", I said, "Oh! You whirl it around your ship to deflect the effects of gravity. Like if you were to fly through a black hole!" Kind of stole his punchline but he smiled and said, "I have had to explain it all to the other people I have told except you!"

A gravity shield would also work. If I knew how to make one, I would be rich and so out of here!

Coolness on a grand scale.

Did they have to use the term "devours?" A black hole ravenously feeding on a passing star brings scarily humongous imagery that doesn't need to be coupled with personifying it as a voracious, sentient predator-god.

My universe was terrible and coldly hostile enough!

Wonder how many sentient beings are stuck falling forever over the horizon in this universe and others?

a reply to: TEOT

A banner day for BH news!

"If black holes fit our expectations, the method I have developed will also allow us to quantify how far from these expectations a theory could be and still fit the data. This will hopefully allow us to rule out many other theories," Medeiros says.

"I'm developing tools so we can actually use EHT observations to test whether Sgr A* is described by the Kerr metric," she added.

Medeiros' work is part of the Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT, an international collaboration attempting to directly image the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy for the first time.

phys.org, Jan 9, 2019 - Student simulates thousands of black holes.

Turns out that it is her dissertation! Not only does she get to defend it, part of it is also being published in Astrophysical Journal. How's that for a shot to the CV??!

Another Mea Culpa: it is the Event Horizon Telescope with no "Project" anywhere near it!

I was reading about where the picture is and they have to write the algorithms to stitch their data together. First they have to identify all radio signals detected and "scrub" the data. Then stitch it all together. They even had to fly the hard drives out of Antarctica! It is slow work. The cool thing is that EHT is not doing just the one image but will continue to gather more data that can be added in the future to the current data set!

And thanks to doctoral candidate, there will be methods of checking observations with calculations.

That is 3 articles on black holes today! I wonder what Universe is trying to tell me?

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF


And where the TerraCotta Soldiers are in the "Forbidden Zone" of China, where UFOs were reported in the past, is full of Mercury...

en.wikipedia.org...

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Flowing rivers of mercury...

www.chemistryworld.com...

a reply to: JimNasium


Didn't they also find some under one of the pyramids in Mexico??

Found it: Liquid Mercury Discovered Beneath Teotihuacan Pyramid.

Working with the stuff, they would have to figured out how toxic it is. What the heck were they doing with that much liquid mercury?

There was a fourth black hole story yesterday!

They found a star that had a dark companion until it flared x-rays. Using a telescope designed to look for x-rays around neutron stars, called NICER (Neutron star Interior Composition ExploreR), they began to study the "cousin" of the supermassive black hole, a stellar mass black hole (they estimate this is 10 times the weight of the sun). The full name is MAXI J1820+070, and they caught both direct x-ray emissions from the accretion disk and reverberations (they call it "echoes" in article) from the black hole's corona's emissions... anyway, details are in the article.

A black hole can siphon gas from a nearby companion star and into a ring of material called an accretion disk. Gravitational and magnetic forces heat the disk to millions of degrees Celsius, making it hot enough to produce X-rays at the inner parts of the disk, near the black hole. Outbursts occur when an instability in the disk causes a flood of gas to suddenly rush inward toward the black hole, like a gaseous avalanche. Astronomers do not yet understand what causes these disk instabilities.

Above the disk is the corona, a region of subatomic particles heated to 1 billion degrees Celsius that glows in higher-energy X-rays. Many mysteries remain about the origin and evolution of a black hole's corona. Some theories suggest the structure could represent an early form of the high-speed particle jets these types of systems often emit.

Astrophysicists want to better understand how the inner edge of a black hole's accretion disk -- and the corona above it -- change in size and shape as a black hole consumes material from a companion star.

ScienceDaily.com, Jan 9, 2019 - Astronomers map 'light echoes' of newly discovered black hole.

How cool is that? 4 black hole articles in one day!

Credit: NASA/CXC/MIT/D. PASHAM ET AL: OPTICAL: HST/STSCI/I. ARCAVI
Source, cosmosmagazine.com - A tiny dot belies great violence.

This is the actual picture from Chandra X-ray Observatory of ASASSN14-li being devoured by the black hole. Those are x-rays being emitted from what is on this side of the event horizon. Somewhere in there is the white dwarf star orbiting around the SMBH every 133 seconds. Remember the SMBH is rotating at 50% the speed of light!

Not even the MIT story has this photo up! news.MIT.edu - X-ray pulse detected near event horizon as black hole devours star.

And to think, I was worried about whether I should have a burger or fish tacos for dinner! Makes the whole idea rather pointless and downright comical when whole stars are being devoured all across the known universe.

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Columbia Univ./A. Johnson et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI

A ricocheting jet blasting from a giant black hole has been captured by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, as reported in our latest press release. In this composite image of Cygnus A, X-rays from Chandra (red, green, and blue that represent low, medium and high energy X-rays) are combined with an optical view from the Hubble Space Telescope of the galaxies and stars in the same field of view. Chandra's data reveal the presence of powerful jets of particles and electromagnetic energy that have shot out from the black hole. The jet on the left has slammed into a wall of hot gas, then ricocheted to punch a hole in a cloud of energetic particles, before it collides with another part of the gas wall.

phys.org, Jan. 10, 2019 - Cygnus A: Ricocheting black hole jet discovered by Chandra.


Credit: Raffaella Margutti/Northwestern University

On June 17, the ATLAS survey's twin telescopes in Hawaii found a spectacularly bright anomaly 200 million light years away in the Hercules constellation. Dubbed AT2018cow or "The Cow," the object quickly flared up, then vanished almost as quickly.

After combining several imaging sources, including hard X-rays and radiowaves, the multi-institutional team now speculates that the telescopes captured the exact moment a star collapsed to form a compact object, such as a black hole or neutron star. The stellar debris, approaching and swirling around the object's event horizon, caused the remarkably bright glow.

phys.org, Jan. 10, 2019 - Birth of a black hole or neutron star captured for first time.

2nd article at phys.org - Unusual supernova opens a rare window on the collapse of a star.

I think we are at 6 BH article in 2 days!! I really hope phys.org is not punking me because I would be really upset!

You might have to go to the first article to actually understand what that picture represents. They have an info-graphic with arrows explaining the EM stream hitting SMBH's surrounding particles then bouncing off that to super heat the white patches seen in the photo.

Nice photo of a BH in action!



The second article is hedging its bets by saying "either neutron star or black hole" being created. They should get an award just for lucking out and getting a cool nickname like, "The Cow"!!

Since the object is in a dwarf galaxy (a dwarf cow?), there was not a lot of stellar material getting in the way so they got a good look inside the cloud to actually see the center. Unlike something like the Orion nebulae where massive clouds of gas and dust hide visible light they got a relatively clear view (the article says, "naked" which might push T&C if I put it all together for you!)

After ATLAS spotted the object, Margutti's team quickly obtained follow-up observations of The Cow with NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and INTEGRAL hard X-ray laboratories, soft X-rays at XMM-Newton and radio antennae at the Very Large Array toward The Cow.

Same source

Look at all the devices pointed at The Cow! This is probably deserving of its own thread because it looks like new science happening (which is always a nice thing to see).

Anyhoo, has this has been the Week of the Black Hole or what?!!

These results were presented at the 233rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, WA,

Source: Cygnus A article

There is the reason for all the recent articles!

One mystery solved. And tomorrow is Friday so there may be more to come!

Bummer, closing reception is on Thursday, Jan 10. Looking over the workshops, lots of cool talks! Even the dull and boring ones about careers sound like fun!

AAS.org 233 meeting link

At the American Astronomical Society's 233rd meeting, which runs through Thursday in Seattle, 10 to 15 percent of the registered participants did not show up in the end, according to organizers—300-450 people out of 3,200.

But 96 percent of NASA staff are considered non-essential, according to Democratic lawmakers. That means 16,700 agency employees have been furloughed until the agency's new budget is approved.

They cannot even attend the winter meeting as a representative via videolink—even if they pay for their travel out of their own pockets.

phys.org - Shutdown keeps US experts away from scientific conferences.

How about that? They say that subcontractors are holding down the fort for NASA.

Science is still being done, as evident in the BH articles, but by universities like MIT and this one below. They figured a way to catalog white dwarfs more precisely over the lifetime of the stars. Being able to get age and mass correctly cuts down on error percent on a star's age. If they can get enough data they think that the error rate, which can be up to 20%, could be cut down to 5%, maybe even less.

eurekalert.com - New technique more precisely determines the ages of stars, Embry-Riddle researchers report.

But no NASA. I guess I lucked out in the cache of BH articles this week!