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Three Super-Massive Black Holes Merging Together in Our Nearby Universe
- leshokunin 5y ago“Nearby universe“? Did we just detect another one I’m not aware of?
- lmilcin 5y agoI was about to comment the same. No, they mean our universe. Sadly. If title was true it would be much more exciting.
- Borrible 5y agoWell, the universe is everywhere. Everything else, not.
- xvilka 5y agoJust a weird wording. I believe they meant "in our neighborhood".
- bradrn 5y agoOr possibly ‘nearby in our universe’.
- happy-go-lucky 5y ago"This is the type of unscripted event in our nearby universe ..." https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/bursts/oddball_burst.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/bursts/oddball_burs... "The first stars, called Population III stars (our star is a Population I star), were much bigger and brighter than any in our nearby universe ..." https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/multimedia/timeline-2006121889912.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/multimedia/timeli... "In our nearby universe, dust is pumped out by dying stars like our sun." https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/10000-earths-worth-of-fresh-dust-found-near-star-explosion https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/10000-earths-worth-of-fresh-du... "We can't yet directly rule out mysterious sources for this light that could be coming from our nearby universe ..." https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-spitzer-finds-first-objects-burned-furiously https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-spitzer-finds-first-obje... Looks like it is not uncommon for them to say so.
- jhgb 5y agoLots of things are "not uncommon" in common speech. That doesn't make them paragons of style.
- snet0 5y agoI know it's a joke but it means nearby universe as distinct from distant universe, if anyone is actually confused.
- scott-smith_us 5y ago...but then wouldn't it make sense to say something like "nearby region of the universe"? Somehow the word "universe" in the phrase "nearby universe" seems redundant (e.g. where ELSE would it be?)
- amelius 5y agoNo, "another universe" is a contradiction since if we found one, our universe would simply be bigger than previously thought and cosmological physics would need an overhaul.
- zzt123 5y agoWouldn’t it be fair to consider a causally disconnected (relative to us) place to be another universe, at least in layman terms? After all, it is expected in a couple trillion years that nothing outside the local group will be observable. Who knows how much “disconnected universe” there is. Unless that is somehow known, which seems difficult since it is by definition causally disconnected.
- flancian 5y agoMax Tegmark covers this in Our Mathematical Universe. It's a question of definitions. He makes the argument that defining "universe" to mean "our visible universe", that is, a radius of around 140B ly, is the most useful; if you assume infinite space and infinite matter (which seem to follow from the theory of inflation, which has provided explanations and predictions elsewhere), there are likely infinitely many universes all around following this definition (for other visibility scopes).
- flancian 5y agoMax Tegmark covers this in Our Mathematical Universe. It's a question of definitions. He makes the argument that defining "universe" to mean "our visible universe", that is, a radius of around 14B ly, is the most useful; if you assume infinite space and infinite matter (which seem to follow from the theory of inflation, which has provided explanations and predictions elsewhere), there are likely infinitely many universes all around following this definition (for other visibility scopes).
- stan_rogers 5y agoJust an unnecessarily pendantic note: the visible (observable) universe would be defined as anything that emitted radiation that would have reached us, and in an expanding universe that means it's considerably larger than 14-ish billion light years radius. Conveniently, it works out to about 14 billion parsecs, so nobody needs to remember another number, they just need to do the conversion.
- dogma1138 5y agoAnything within 1 billion light years from us is considered “near by universe”, it’s sometimes also called our local universe. Tt’s the region of space around us in which cosmic evolution doesn’t play a major factor for observations unlike something that say is 10 billion light years away. Basically it’s a anything close enough to us that when we observe it we can assume that at least as far as the galactic evolution goes it’s in a current or “developed” state, as in mature and fully formed galaxies.
- jhgb 5y agoThat's usually called "space", not "universe". The universe is the entirety of space around us. By virtue of countability, the phrase "nearby universe" is problematic since it suggests contrast with other, "far" universes (which don't include the space around us).
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago"Hot singles in your area" is a bit different than "Hot singles in your nearby area." The term "nearby universe" is perfectly fine, as far as the English language goes.
- garbagetime 5y ago> "Hot singles in your nearby area." This doesn't sound like standard English either, though.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y agoIf it's good enough for the New York Times, it's good enough for me: https://ludwig.guru/s/nearby+area https://ludwig.guru/s/nearby+area
- kbelder 5y agoBad rule of thumb, in general.
- corobo 5y agoI think it's more supposed to read as close to us Casually dropping the discovery of the multiverse as a footnote would be fun though
- leshokunin 5y ago“I found a more comfortable pillow for cryogenically suspended space travel!”
- dghughes 5y agoYes the phrasing threw me off too. It's like saying there's a room in a "nearby house" when you mean your own house.
- VelkaMorava 5y agoAnd in a true HN fashion, the award for most autistic and pointlessly pedantic comment goes to you.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 88840-8855 5y agoWhat I just realised - imagine we are living in the future and have colonized distant planets. We might need a new tense that indicates that an event has already happened on that distant planet, but due to speed of light limitations, this information has not yet arrived at the observer.
- ThalesX 5y agoWe have this in my native language; adapted to English, it would sound like <It will have happened>. Three black holes will have merged in a nearby galaxy.
- diegoperini 5y agoTurkish has such flavors of past tenses. They are called "observed past" and "learned past" tenses. As the names imply, one is used when you witness the event. The other is used when you forget that you witnessed or you heard it from someone else.
- system2 5y agoDid anyone say anything about Turkish?
- moab 5y agoThe comment is about turkish tenses that are "similar" to the kind of knowledge conveyed in the tenses OP points out. It seems relevant to me.
- ehnto 5y agoThe relevancy is obvious. Someone wondered if we will need new words for different nuances of tense, and this comment described that Turkish has some of those already.
- shsbdncudx 5y agoWe wouldn’t know about such events until light reached us anyway - light is the speed of causality, so we’d never apply this tense you propose.
- wirthjason 5y agoI know this has nothing to do with the article but there’s been too many global warming news headlines recently and it’s making me depressed. I read this one and imagined the opening to be… > The effects of global warming have produced wildfires, hurricanes, drought, and other extreme events at an alarming pace. The situation has gone from bad to worse as scientists recently discovered three super massive black holes merging together in our nearby universe.
- drclau 5y agoI think it’s important we all become aware of the reality of the climate crisis. The fact that we aren’t yet is one of the reasons we have failed to deal with it better. I was very surprised to find out that some people around me, which are software engineers and reasonably well informed people, were oblivious to the dangers the climate crisis poses. To this end, maybe it’s important to repeat it many times, until it hits everyone.
- bilinguliar 5y agoI am wondering if antitrust laws are applicable in this case.
- tannhaeuser 5y agoOf course they are! It's just that this mass concentration appears to be outside a domestic regulated market and NASA/ESA are as helpless as the FTC against laws of nature.
- saagarjha 5y agoThere's plenty of competition from smaller mom-and-pop black holes in your Local Group.
- yashasolutions 5y agoThree Super-Massive Black Holes get into a bar...
- ncmncm 5y agoThese are still tens if not hundreds of thousands of light-years apart. It will take how long, a billion years?, for dynamical friction to bring them together? How close do they need to be before gravitational radiation begins to carry away enough energy that merging can proceed without depending on external mass?
- chasil 5y agoThe article mentions the "final parsec problem," which implies that a binary pair will never merge. A three-body arrangement is one scenario where a merger can take place. "Gravitational waves can cause significant loss of orbital energy, but not until the separation shrinks to a much smaller value, roughly 0.01–0.001 parsec." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_black_hole#Final_parsec_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_black_hole#Final_parsec...
- ncmncm 5y agoThank you. This seems to suggest that the black-hole mergers picked up by LIGO must have involved an unseen third participant. Or is this required only for supermassive black holes to merge? Is there any rational hope of picking up (e.g.) periodically varying red-shift of secondary radiation from the (presumably large) collection of black-hole pairs stuck in parsec-range orbits? Is there any process tending to align the rotational axes of accretion discs on bodies in this condition?
- zanethomas 5y agoomg, the universe is going to be sucked into one gigantic black hole!
- zanethomas 5y agowhoever down-voted that needs to rent a sense of humor!
- anonuser123456 5y agoFor anyone that had the question "How do two black holes merge given time dilation?" http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/91-the-universe/black-holes-and-quasars/merging-black-holes/1091-what-what-a-black-hole-merger-look-like-from-a-telescope-advanced http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/91-the-universe/bl...
- elefanten 5y agoThat was interesting but I’m not sure it answered the question? Was the answer that they don’t “time freeze” at the threshold of event horizons touching each other, but instead “pucker out” to meet each other?
- crazydoggers 5y agoI agree the wording in the article isn’t too clear, maybe a bit oversimplified. One thing to keep in mind. What we see as the black hole is really the “event horizon”. To a local observer there’s nothing special at that location. You wouldn’t notice anything crossing it. So really as the black holes merge, we see their event horizons merge. It’s not really valid to say one horizon falls into the other, as they are simply space time points like any other. What happens to the singularities is probably a whole lot more complex and I don’t know if it’s well defined. In addition, there’s a lot more typically going on around most black holes since many have accretion disks of materials accelerated at relativistic speeds and are also rotating causing other gravitational complexities. Where I think the article hits the nail on the head, is we need complex simulations and ultimately more data on observations to create more accurate models.
- scott-smith_us 5y ago"Nearby Universe"?
- GavinMcG 5y agoITT: people insist that a term of art is objectively wrong because it doesn't match their subjective lay sensibilities. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/term_of_art https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/term_of_art
- mclightning 5y agoI didn't understand anything from this sentence.
- wumpus 5y ago"nearby universe" is astronomy jargon.
- andy_ppp 5y agoIt’s slightly weird to think this will happen at a certain time for us but presumably at this point space time will be bent in such a way that what does time even mean anymore…