Category: not Sci-Fi

A super telescope will take an image of a Super Massive Black Hole and the resulting image will be so massive – it can’t be processed digitally and they will truck it to MIT and Germany for processing

not Sci-Fi, Space

The Event Horizon Telescope makes use of a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) that requires several telescopes observing the same object from different locations to create highly detailed images of very, very small sections of the sky. The farther apart the telescopes are located, the greater the detail they can achieve. The Event Horizon Telescope will link eight radio telescopes around the world, including the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory in Hawaii, the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano in Mexico, the South Pole Telescope in Antarctica, and other facilities in France and Spain to utilize the longest baselines possible. By creating a truly Earth-sized telescope, the project should be capable of imaging the space around a black hole in exquisite detail.

 

This will allow astronomers to study not only the structure of the disk around the black hole, but also to test general relativity, get a better look at how the black hole actually feeds on material, and maybe even determine how the outflows and jets that are so common among black holes are actually created.

 

The giant telescope came online April 5 and will observe for about a week and a half, gathering data until April 14. In addition to imaging our relatively quiescent Sgr A*, it will also look at the more active supermassive black hole residing in Messier 87, a huge elliptical galaxy in the nearby Virgo Cluster.  The amount of information obtained will be so immense that it’s too large to transfer digitally — it will be stored physically and taken to the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and the Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts for processing.

 

 

http://www.astronomy.com/news/2017/04/first-image-of-a-black-hole

Scientists say they have detected an atmosphere around an Earth-like planet for the first time. Get the ships out!

not Sci-Fi, Space

Scientists say they have detected an atmosphere around an Earth-like planet for the first time.

They have studied a world known as GJ 1132b, which is 1.4-times the size of our planet and lies 39 light years away.

Their observations suggest that the “super-Earth” is cloaked in a thick layer of gasses that are either water or methane or a mixture of both.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39521344

Discovering an atmosphere, and characterising it, is an important step forward in the hunt for life beyond our Solar System.

But it is highly unlikely that this world is habitable: it has a surface temperature of 370C.

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Not to be picky but if aliens are just like Earthmen they wouldn’t be aliens would they? What if a gaseous fuzzy hot cloud happens to think? Would it be any stranger than, say, meaty floppy things doing the same? I personally like taking 370C showers.

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The study is published in the Astronomical Journal.

Detection of the Atmosphere of the 1.6 M ⊕ Exoplanet GJ 1132 b

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/aa6477/meta

I am having multiple quazargasms

NASA, not Sci-Fi, Space

via https://www.instagram.com/sciencefictionthriller/

 

http://chandra.si.edu/photo/2014/rxj1131/

 

…..without permission

    • Astronomers have directly measured the spin of a supermassive black hole in a quasar that is located 6 billion light years away.
    • This is the most distant black hole where such a measurement has been made.
    • Black holes are defined by just two simple characteristics: mass and spin.
  • Finding out how quickly black holes are spinning reveals important information about how they grow over time.

 

Multiple images of a distant quasar are visible in this combined view from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope. The Chandra data, along with data from ESA’s XMM-Newton, were used to directly measure the spin of the supermassive black hole powering this quasar. This is the most distant black hole where such a measurement has been made, as reported in our press release.

Gravitational lensing by an intervening elliptical galaxy has created four different images of the quasar, shown by the Chandra data in pink. Such lensing, first predicted by Einstein, offers a rare opportunity to study regions close to the black hole in distant quasars, by acting as a natural telescope and magnifying the light from these sources. The Hubble data in red, green and blue shows the elliptical galaxy in the middle of the image, along with other galaxies in the field.

The quasar is known as RX J1131-1231 (RX J1131 for short), located about 6 billion light years from Earth. Using the gravitational lens, a high quality X-ray spectrum – that is, the amount of X-rays seen at different energies – of RX J1131 was obtained.

The X-rays are produced when a swirling accretion disk of gas and dust that surrounds the black hole creates a multimillion-degree cloud, or corona near the black hole. X-rays from this corona reflect off the inner edge of the accretion disk. The reflected X-ray spectrum is altered by the strong gravitational forces near the black hole. The larger the change in the spectrum, the closer the inner edge of the disk must be to the black hole.

The authors of the new study found that the X-rays are coming from a region in the disk located only about three times the radius of the event horizon, the point of no return for infalling matter. This implies that the black hole must be spinning extremely rapidly to allow a disk to survive at such a small radius.

This result is important because black holes are defined by just two simple characteristics: mass and spin. While astronomers have long been able to measureblack hole masses very effectively, determining their spins have been much more difficult.

These spin measurements can give researchers important clues about how black holes grow over time. If black holes grow mainly from collisions and mergers between galaxies they should accumulate material in a stable disk, and the steady supply of new material from the disk should lead to rapidly spinning black holes. In contrast if black holes grow through many small accretion episodes, they will accumulate material from random directions. Like a merry go round that is pushed both backwards and forwards, this would make the black hole spin more slowly.

The discovery that space-time at the black hole’s event horizon is spinning at over half the speed of light suggests that RX J1131, observed at a distance of six billion light years, corresponding to an age about 7.7 billion years after the Big Bang, has grown via mergers, rather than pulling material in from different directions.

These results were published online in the journal Nature. The lead author is Rubens Reis of the University of Michigan. His co-authors are Mark Reynolds and Jon M. Miller, also of Michigan, as well as Dominic Walton of the California Institute of Technology.