Showing posts with label Black hole. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Black hole. Show all posts

Friday, November 21, 2014

Some Things Travel Faster Than Light

The lonely photon is now king of the universe ...
The lonely photon is now king of the universe as the last of the supermassive black holes evaporate. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Locating Black Holes in Distant Galaxies
Locating Black Holes in Distant Galaxies (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Black hole quasar NASA
Black hole quasar NASA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The supermassive black holes are all that rema...
The supermassive black holes are all that remains of galaxies once all protons decay, but even these giants are not immortal. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)


Spooky alignment of quasars across billions of light-years
the rotation axes of the central supermassive black holes in a sample of quasars are parallel to each other. .... alignments of the largest structures ever discovered in the universe. ... the rotation axes of these quasars tend to be aligned with the vast structures in the cosmic web in which they reside. ..... Quasars are very active supermassive black holes at the nuclei of galaxies. These black holes are surrounded by spinning disks of extremely hot material that is often spewed out in long jets along their axes of rotation. Quasars can shine more brightly than all the stars in the rest of their host galaxies put together. ...... 93 quasars that were known to form huge groupings spread over billions of light-years, seen at a time when the universe was about one-third of its current age. ..... a cosmic web of filaments and clumps around huge voids where galaxies are scarce. This intriguing and beautiful arrangement of material is known as large-scale structure. ...... if the quasars are in a long filament, then the spins of the central black holes will point along the filament. ..... a hint that there is a missing ingredient in our current models of the cosmos





Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Interstellar

Simulated gravitational lensing (black hole go...
Simulated gravitational lensing (black hole going past a background galaxy). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)


I don't see this kind of interstellar human travel in my lifetime. But a thousand years from now, all bets will be off. Maybe even sooner.

Wrinkles In Spacetime: The Warped Astrophysics Of Interstellar
black holes, as the name suggests, are murder on light ..... Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, the computation overtaxed by the bendy bits of distortion caused by an Einsteinian effect called gravitational lensing. In the end the movie brushed up against 800 terabytes of data. “I thought we might cross the petabyte threshold on this one,” von Tunzelmann says. ..... “Chris really wanted us to sell the idea that the black hole is spherical,” Franklin says. “I said, ‘You know, it's going to look like a disk.’ The only thing you can see is the way it warps starlight.” Then Franklin started reading about accretion disks, agglomerations of matter that orbit some black holes. Franklin figured that he could use this ring of orbiting detritus to define the sphere. ...... “We found that warping space around the black hole also warps the accretion disk,” Franklin says. “So rather than looking like Saturn's rings around a black sphere, the light creates this extraordinary halo.” ..... Light, temporarily trapped around the black hole, produced an unexpectedly complex fingerprint pattern near the black hole's shadow. And the glowing accretion disk appeared above the black hole, below the black hole, and in front of it. “I never expected that,” Thorne says. ...... Thorne got a movie that teaches a mass audience some real, accurate science. But he also got something he didn't expect: a scientific discovery. ..... Thorne says he can get at least two published articles out of it. ...... haloed, spinning black hole and galaxy-spanning wormhole are not just metaphors