black holes

[bozon]

What about when two galaxies collide? Wouldn't the two eventually unite into one single larger galactic core?

Yes they merge. Stellar-mass black holes (remains of massive stars) binaries also merge. It is the hope that the gravity waves that these events create will be detected in the next decades.

Oddly enough, black holes are the brightest objects in the universe. However, it is not really the black hole that shines, it is the effect it has on its environment while it accretes gas. The existance of a massive black hole (a few million times the mass of our sun) is now almost beyond doubt. By measuring the orbits of the stars around it the mass can be calculated. Such a huge mass in such a small volume that emit very little light and definitely unlike the spectrum of stars can only be a super-massive black hole. The other alternatives are much more exotic and unlikely.

[dedalos]

Moot, that implies that the gravitational field only exists or is stronger at a disk at the equator and weaker at the poles.  How is that possible?  Also, how do they know so match and have been able to create illustrations of something they can not see but only speculate that it is there?  I am not saying they do not exist.  Just asking how could they explain and illustrate something they only "know" it is there by observing the surroundings.  This is just everything else.  It will be a fact until they discover something else.

Hawking s latest is that black holes eventually disappear and what ever matter they have devoured also disappears with them.  Again, no observation.  Just speculation using a lot of math and even more made up constants.  Tomorrow, the facts will be something else.

[dedalos]

The other alternatives are much more exotic and unlikely.

Like saying, it was not a dog, not a fox, it must have been a choupakabra cause anything else would just be too strange 

[moot]

How is that what it implies?

They don't know but wager on the best explanation, considering everything else taken more or less for granted. IE inference.  The illustration is for communication purposes.. Just like the difference between ideation/communication/documentation sketches in engineering.

Tomorrow, the facts will be something else.

Sounds like arguing Xenos paradox "impossible 1/2 distances" dynamic in scientific investigation.. That there's an overabundance of possible explanation is a given in principle, and totally established as a trend historically.. Not surprising when you're dealing with a domain of investigation where every answer raises more questions.. And when relatively little of the whole human population actually chips in to scientific investigation.

[dedalos]

How is that what it implies?

They don't know but wager on the best explanation, considering everything else taken more or less for granted. IE inference.  The illustration is for communication purposes.. Just like the difference between ideation/communication/documentation sketches in engineering.

So, in your opinion they know for sure and understand everything there is to know about the creation and behavior of a black hole?

The pictures imply that because that is what they show.  I'd like to see the engineering version then instead of teh cartoon version.

[100Coogn]

This is how I see it happening...


                             

Coogan 

[Ripsnort]

^^

[moot]

So, in your opinion they know for sure and understand everything there is to know about the creation and behavior of a black hole?

It's conjecture with certainty in various shades of grey, like probably all science.

The pictures imply that because that is what they show.  I'd like to see the engineering version then instead of teh cartoon version.

The pictures are models.  Engineering is even more vulgarized than investigative science.  Engineering trend is to not care why something works if it just works.  An ideation sketch = napkin scribble.  Communication sketch can be napkin sketch but usually more like venn diagrams made a little more realistic looking.  When you omit many details, parts, and layers in a full-blown 3D CAD schematic, and color-code some/most of it, that's a communication sketch.  Documentation sketch is where you find heads-to-toe precision and accuracy like construction blueprints.

But even at the construction blueprint level you're dealing with a model.  The illustration isn't actually concrete and tile and glass.  It's ink on paper. It doesn't pretend to be what it represents. The black hole drawings above are just communication sketches to inform people of what the conjectured model is.  A gist.

[Gh0stFT]

It is the hope that the gravity waves that these events create will be detected in the next decades.

now this would be something! the search is still on, but it is not easy to detect them, imagine a thin line
from our star to the next star and it moves up and down aprox a diameter of a Human Hair, thats the wave
they try to find

btw. black holes, the smaller ones, very small ones could be theoretically created inside the LHC, so lets see...

[dunnrite]

OH hell...We're all just a drop on a slide on some kid's microscope and when he gets tired of looking at us, he'll wipe us off.

[curry1]

shows about deep space never fail to blow my mind.

was watching one about black holes last night, and apparently the reason they are black is because they are so massive, light does not travel fast enough to escape it. in fact, if you were to get close enough to one, you would not be able to send transmissions on what it is like, because radio waves, which travel at the speed of light, would not be able to make it back to where you're trying to transmit to. as you get pulled in by the immense gravity, since your feet are closer to the black hole than your head, they get pulled in faster, and you get stretched like a peice of taffy, until you are simply squeezed to death. the hypernova explosion that is believed to create black holes is the equivalent to a 100 million-billion megaton nuclear blast, and you can see these explosions from literally across the universe.

mind=BLOWN

i don't know, i thought i would share this with you all, because this stuff never ceases to amaze me.

I thought it was called a supernova?  Did those astronomers change the terminology again?    Not the first time I guess Pluto is no longer a planet...

[dedalos]

It's conjecture with certainty in various shades of grey, like probably all science.

Sounds like we agree then 

[MaSonZ]

I thought it was called a supernova?  Did those astronomers change the terminology again?    Not the first time I guess Pluto is no longer a planet...

it is  supernova....but somewhere along the line this supernova picks up a stupid amount of gravity....maybe Moot can chime in more. seems to know more then anyone else here.

think i learned more from moot today then i did all year in science class 

[Tupac]

This is how I see it happening...


                             (Image removed from quote.)

Coogan 

Galactic spooning.

[bozon]

I thought it was called a supernova?  Did those astronomers change the terminology again?    Not the first time I guess Pluto is no longer a planet...

Nova, supernova and hypernova are energetic scales for an "explosive" events in a dying star. The different amount of energies involved relate to different processes that produce these events. Nova is a nuclear explosion due to accretion of material onto a compact object like a neutron star. Supernova is the way some stars end their lives and there are several kinds that depend on the exact scenario. Sometimes it destroys the star completely, sometimes it leaves a neutron star. Hypernova is an even more energetic supernova. It is not exactly clear what happens there, but the common idea is that this is how particularily massive stars end their short lives by collapsing straight into a black hole. It is usually under the broad definition of a supernova.

So, in your opinion they know for sure and understand everything there is to know about the creation and behavior of a black hole?

The pictures imply that because that is what they show.  I'd like to see the engineering version then instead of teh cartoon version.

The cartoon intent is only to give a rough illustration and combine different pieces of information  into one picture we can keep in our heads. The details in it are far from consensus among astronomers, but they agree on the broad picture of it. Astronomy (and science in general) has developed tools to investigate things that cannot be imaged by a camera. In the case of active galactic nuclear (AGN) the elements in the picture represent a large amount of investigations using spectroscopy, timing analysis and statistical surveys.

Example:
Astronomers see broadened spectral lines that indicate velocity dispersion of 1000s km/sec. These must come from "things" close to a very compact gravitational source (nothing else can create such a dispersion) - depicted as clouds in what is called the "broad line region". From analysis of the variation in brightness in time astronomers know the distance between the central bright light source and reflecting clouds around it - echoes of these variations are seen in the reflected light. From the statistics of how many of these objects appear highly obscured and in how many the light reaches us without much in the way we know that there is thick material around the central source that cover a certain fraction of the sphere around it (depicted as a torus in the images). and so on.