http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...624&e=1&u=/ap/20040218/ap_on_sc/doomed_star_3
Very Cool....Hope we never get cought in one of those😱
Very Cool....Hope we never get cought in one of those😱
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AP Photo Black Hole Seen Ripping Star Apart
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rainman::|:|
macrumors 603
quite a historic day, finally proof of planetary destruction caused by black holes... admittedly most people already thought this, but it's good to cement the ideas that we are basing further theories on...
paul
paul
markjones05
macrumors 6502a
From the site:
This an artist's Illustration of the RX J1242-11 system depicting how the catastrophic destruction of a star that wandered too close to a supermassive black hole may have occurred.
Looks like it's not actually a picture of the event.
Ive read about black holes. Its interesting. actually you can NEVER see a black hole with your bare eyes. That pic is just what someone depicts as a black hole. Remember that a black hole absorbs light and never lets it escape? The reason you arent able to see a black hole is because there is a certain point before the black hole where the light is at a "standstill." In this area, the rate of absorbtion is EXACTLY the speed of light. So in a sense you could be heading towards somehting that looks like a star, but is actaully "frozen light." THe only time you will know if youve reached a black hole is... well... when its already too late.
Strange huh?
Strange huh?
Counterfit
macrumors G3
Not to sure, but i remember one of my teachers talking about how it works. I just forgot 😕 oh well. maybe some research would be good 😛
Fender2112
macrumors 65816
Hypothetically ...
If you are in a vehicle traveling through space at the speed light and you turn on your head lights, will they work?
And another one:
If an UNSTOPPABLE object collides head on with an IMMOVABLE object, what happens?
Ya'll think about it. 🙂
If you are in a vehicle traveling through space at the speed light and you turn on your head lights, will they work?
And another one:
If an UNSTOPPABLE object collides head on with an IMMOVABLE object, what happens?
Ya'll think about it. 🙂
kiwi_the_iwik
macrumors 65816
If light/matter is being pulled into the black hole from all directions, then light that is YET to be pulled inside will EMIT towards the observer prior to the gravitational threshold - and as the light is sucked towards an equidistant point at its centre, the black hole should (theoretically, at least) look like a star.
There's also a point where the magnetic force of a black hole actually bends light due to its gravitational pull, which would be the dead-giveaway that a black hole was in the vicinity.
Not only that, a black hole also emits a great deal of noise in the radio band.
Many thanks to Kip Thorne...
😉
There's also a point where the magnetic force of a black hole actually bends light due to its gravitational pull, which would be the dead-giveaway that a black hole was in the vicinity.
Not only that, a black hole also emits a great deal of noise in the radio band.
Many thanks to Kip Thorne...
😉
Would it have the same effect on a sock? 'Cause I'm pretty sure I have one of those in my clothes dryer.
rainman::|:|
macrumors 603
You're using old information, i think. It's been suggested, and is indeed becoming widely accepted, that a black hole may be shaped like a cone-- because of the distortion of spacetime, assuming spacetime is somewhat linear and a black hole would not rupture it, spacetime would basically stretch into a cone.
As for light escaping, any light source that was outside of the event horizon (point in the cone that objects cannot escape from, as the singularity's pull takes over all) at least some light escape (away from the singularity), however the gravitational fields would still have an effect, and the light could be slowed very greatly if near the event horizon... i'm talking light taking years to move a few meters. But once the light source enters the event horizon, the gravitational pull on the light would oppose the speed of the light, eventually reversing it and sucking it back down.
As a matter of advice, i would advise people to stay a ways back from an event horizon, if you should ever encounter one... but, as said before, the visibility of such a thing would be nill...
And as for the matter of the illustration... keep in mind, when you see images of deep space, it's usually a composite shot of several telescopes, perhaps enhanced to show more data in a visible spectrum. Point is, you can see roughly what's happening, it's not meant as proof.
paul
Counterfit
macrumors G3
I keep one in my closet 😀
Fender: If you can find an unstoppable and an immovable object, please let me know. Anything with sufficient mass and/or speed can set anything else in motion.
One of the many fun facts about the formation of black holes is that time at the surface of the collapsing star is infinitely slowed compared to time at a relative position outside. So if we watch a star collapse into a black hole, passing the critical radius at which the timewarp becomes infinite (about 3 kilometers if the mass matches our sun), the activity just outside the radius seems to freeze, while, from the point of view of someone just outside the collapse, we Earthlings and the rest of the universe appear to speed through all of time.
If you fall into a black hole feet first, you will be torn apart since your toes will be subject to stronger gravity than your nose, but you'll have plenty of time to call for help!
If you fall into a black hole feet first, you will be torn apart since your toes will be subject to stronger gravity than your nose, but you'll have plenty of time to call for help!
MrMacMan
macrumors 604
Indeed, it was always theoretical, just proves a point.
Doctor Q -- You can scream all you want but unless pain can be transmitted faster then the massive amount of gravity pulling on you... your not gonna feel squat...
Also there is to 'air' in SPACE... how are you gonna call for help anyway.
Anyway if your moving at light speed... thats impossible. Your are nonexistent.
Now going 2x the speed of light is easy.
If I throw a ball at 20 miles an hour and .0001 seconds later I throw a ball at 20 miles an hour will I see ___ happen...
no. 😉
The car and the lightspeed will not work.
You can't 'create' light in such a scenario.
Ambrose Chapel
macrumors 65816
Re: Hypothetically ...
well in the immortal words of ella fitzgerald, "something's gotta give something's gotta give something's gotta give"
😉 😀 🙂
well in the immortal words of ella fitzgerald, "something's gotta give something's gotta give something's gotta give"
😉 😀 🙂
no problem
The theory of relativity does not rule out moving faster than light. An object moving faster than light is simply prohibited from slowing to the speed of light, i.e., it is a barrier you can't cross. I wonder if that's a valid excuse for a speeding ticket?
Police officer: Do you know how fast you were going?
You: No, officer, but I have to get to the Apple Store for the iPod Mini rollout party.
Police officer: Well, you were going 300,000 kilometers per second in a 65 mile per hour zone. Let's see, there are 1.609344 kilometers in a mile, and 3600 seconds in an hour...
You: I tried to slow down, officer, but I couldn't go slower than 299,792.4358 kilometers per second without violating another kind of law.
Police officer: Well, OK then. Would you like a police escort to the Apple Store? Tell me more about these iPods...
MrMacMan
macrumors 604
Oh yeah...
You did say 'scream' so...
Also the iSight doesn't have anytype of lens that could get a picture of you being sucked into a black whole... because the iSight itself would need to be mighty far away....
Heck there is no possible way to escape from a blackwhole anyway... even if they 'could' see you... anything that got close would be pulled in.
I've always wondered this... Is there a speed that one COULD escape the massive gravity of a black whole... I mean like can't it only suck in so much and at such a speed at one time... or is its sucking ability infinte?
I really don't understand why something going faster then lightspeed couldn't be slowed to lightspeed itself (or under)...
Then again how could anything every speed UP above lightspeed, or even get to lightspeed...
It would have to travel constantly, never ending above the speed of light to keep that law correct eh?
[BTW, that was a Futurama reference... 2x the speed of light was how fast the spin went]
The "rubber sheet model" can be used to illustrate the idea that gravity warps space-time, and it might let us answer your question. In our 3D world, think of a rubber sheet with a bowling ball place on it. The bowling ball bends the sheet, making a dip in the surface.
If you roll marbles dipped in ink on the sheet, you find that marbles away from the sheet roll in a straight line and are not affected by the bowling ball. Marbles rolled slowly close to the bowling ball fall into its dip and follow a curved path downward. If you flatten the sheet afterward and look at the ink trail, it'll look mighty strange for a marble rolled in a straight line to start to spiral back. If you roll the marble faster, it should have less chance of falling in, i.e., it needs a certain escape velocity to have its path bent, but not captured, by the bowling ball. The ink path left in this case appears to bend as if pulled from the side.
Crawling on the rubber sheet, a 2D creature that can't see the third dimension will find objects turning torward the bowling ball in what appears to be a gravitational attraction, when, to us in 3D, it's really a deformation of space. It's in the next dimension past the creature's senses.
In our 3D space, the same idea applies (or in 4D space-time). A huge mass like our black hole would pull in anything going close or slow, bend the path of something going faster and/or further away, and barely affect something distant. So not everything would be sucked in. If you go fast enough, you might be able to get close enough to take a photo of me falling in and then post it at MacRumors when you get back to Earth.
The rule that if you go faster than light you can never slow down to the speed of light or below is simply a mathematical result. It doesn't say that it is possible to go faster than light. It just doesn't rule it out. Imagine that you were traveling on the hyperbola below. You can move as far as you like toward or away from the Y axis along the X axis on either side, but you can never cross from one side of 0 to the other. People on the positive side might understand the formula while still not knowing if there could actually be creatures on the other side.
Warning: I may not be explaining any of this properly. My qualifications are that I enjoy reading about science stuff that I barely understand. Maybe we'll get lucky and a real astrophysicist will correct my misstatements.
funkywhat2
macrumors 6502a
<offtopic>
did you make that with graphing calculator? i really miss that app. too bad there's no os x native version.
</offtopic>
No, I "borrowed" it from another web site, since I just needed to show the pattern, not a particular formula. See this thread about graphing calculators.
Mr. Anderson
Moderator emeritus
That's a 2D representation. Rotate that curve around an axis diagonally through the center in the quadrants that don't contain the curve and you get a way to reach both sides (requires more dimensions, but there actually are so it might happen) 😀
D
Earendil
macrumors 68000
Originally posted by BaDBoY
So in a sense you could be heading towards somehting that looks like a star, but is actaully "frozen light." The only time you will know if youve reached a black hole is... well... when its already too late.
Wouldn't that suck if you found out you were jumping head on into a black hole instead of a star?
wait a minute...
So in a sense you could be heading towards somehting that looks like a star, but is actaully "frozen light." The only time you will know if youve reached a black hole is... well... when its already too late.
Wouldn't that suck if you found out you were jumping head on into a black hole instead of a star?
wait a minute...
Snowy_River
macrumors 68030
Oh Boy! An Impromptu Physics Lecture!!
The discriptions offered so far are, in fact, for the most part accurate. However, there are a few points to clear up. First, light always travels at the speed of light. It never stops, or slows down (except for some special cases at the quantum level where photons can have speeds both greater than and less than the speed of light, but that gets a bit more complicated than what we want to worry about here). The reason that light appears to go more slowly in a powerful gravity well (i.e. near a black hole) is due to what is called the Lorentz contraction of space-time.
Now, we all know the story of the person that travels away from Earth near the speed of light, then travels back. The traveler only experiences one day of time but on Earth 100 years has gone by, right? Well, from the perspective of the traveler, it was the Earth that traveled away at near the speed of light. So, why didn't time travel the opposite, 100 years for the traveler and 1 day for Earth? The answer is that the funny stuff happens during acceleration, not when traveling so fast. So, it's when the traveler accelerates to near the speed of light, then accelerates back the other direction, and finally slows down again that the time inconsistencies develop.
Now, what does this have to do with black holes and the appearance of light traveling so slow? Well, this effect is present anytime something is accelerating, even when that acceleration is due to gravity. So, when light is in a powerful gravity field, time is dilated thus, from our perspective, the light seems to move more slowly, while, in fact, from its point of view it's still moving just as fast as ever.
Okay, end of lecture for the moment.... 🙂
The discriptions offered so far are, in fact, for the most part accurate. However, there are a few points to clear up. First, light always travels at the speed of light. It never stops, or slows down (except for some special cases at the quantum level where photons can have speeds both greater than and less than the speed of light, but that gets a bit more complicated than what we want to worry about here). The reason that light appears to go more slowly in a powerful gravity well (i.e. near a black hole) is due to what is called the Lorentz contraction of space-time.
Now, we all know the story of the person that travels away from Earth near the speed of light, then travels back. The traveler only experiences one day of time but on Earth 100 years has gone by, right? Well, from the perspective of the traveler, it was the Earth that traveled away at near the speed of light. So, why didn't time travel the opposite, 100 years for the traveler and 1 day for Earth? The answer is that the funny stuff happens during acceleration, not when traveling so fast. So, it's when the traveler accelerates to near the speed of light, then accelerates back the other direction, and finally slows down again that the time inconsistencies develop.
Now, what does this have to do with black holes and the appearance of light traveling so slow? Well, this effect is present anytime something is accelerating, even when that acceleration is due to gravity. So, when light is in a powerful gravity field, time is dilated thus, from our perspective, the light seems to move more slowly, while, in fact, from its point of view it's still moving just as fast as ever.
Okay, end of lecture for the moment.... 🙂