11 ms·

Supermassive Black Hole Eruption Near Earth Spanning 16 Times Full Moon

58 points by wglb 5y ago

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Spanning 8 degrees, 12 million light years away? That's insane. A feature that's 1.67 million light years across? That's insane. That's a sixth of the size of the entire local cluster.
- dclowd9901 5y ago
  I was surprised that the moon only measures two degrees across the sky!
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Half the width of your thumb held out at arm's length. Sun, likewise, of course. So these radio lobes reach out another moon-width from both sides of your thumb.
  - shagie 5y ago
    As noted, 0.5° across... but this misconception is in part because 360° or even 180° is really big when you're sitting at the center of it. I believe part of this misconception comes from that when we look at something, we're only paying attain to +/- 15° while the bifocal range is 120° and the full field of view with both eyes is about 200°. Additionally, the field of view of the photographs that involve the sun or moon are often in the 5° to 15° range. That narrow range photograph - https://www.deviantart.com/shagie/art/Crescent-Moonset-7082381 https://www.deviantart.com/shagie/art/Crescent-Moonset-70823... and that has a 3.4° field of view on the short axis. This is closer to the regular field of view - https://www.deviantart.com/shagie/art/Moon-and-sunset-3181113 https://www.deviantart.com/shagie/art/Moon-and-sunset-318111... though I shot it portrait rather than landscape. That has a 27° field of view on the short axis and a 40° field of view on the long axis. Another aspect of the moon and its size and the sky sphere - it moves at a fairly good clip. The sun is easier to think of though, it moves through 360° is 24h. That gives 15°/h or 0.25°/m. Every two minutes, the sun moves a solar diameter across the sky the moon has a similar amount of motion over a short period of time. This makes it difficult to take long exposures of the moon without a tracking mount.
    - sliken 5y ago
      Heh, it's easy to think these days that the moon is larger than you think. Especially with so many articles showing huge detailed pictures of the moon. Try taking a picture of the moon with a cell phone (even one with the best in the market camera) and be prepared to be disappointed.
      - shagie 5y ago
        My first experience with "well, that didn't work" was about 30 years ago. I had a 35mm point and shoot (fixed focus too) camera. I shot one roll at night trying to photograph the full moon. They didn't even cut the film. When looking at the negatives, all that you could see on a long strip of film was an occasional very small black dot. From this, I learned two things: (1) The moon is much smaller in the sky than you think it is. (2) Take a picture of a white wall or similar thing to expose an entire frame so that additional frames can be calculated form that first (or last or both) frame and the proper cuts of the film can be made.
        sliken 5y ago
        I've got a Pixel 6 pro, 4x optical zoom, decent sensor, and a astrophotography mode. It does take some nice sky photos, but the moon is just too small.
        shagie 5y ago
        Cameras on phones just aren't designed for the narrow field of view that much of astrophotography uses. The thing to look up is "wide field astrophotography" - but even then, you get into issues. While it's a little dated (digital has come a long way), if you are interested in it with a "real" camera... hunt up a copy of Heavenly Bodies: The Photographer's Guide to Astrophotography by Bert P Krages.
        wglb 5y ago
        My canon SX 50 does nicely, filling the viewfinder with the full moon
Grakel 5y ago
Apparently 12 million light-years is near Earth. I know it's lame to comment on the single stupid thing in an article, but this is absurd.
- jessriedel 5y ago
  Yea, "near Milky Way" would have been better. The closest galaxy (Andromeda) is 2.5 million light-years, so 12 million to Centaurus A is pretty close. It's also the fifth brightest galaxy in the sky, so "near" in that sense too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurus_A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurus_A
  - hinkley 5y ago
    "In nearby galaxy" probably got canned by the editors, who as we all know from many many sessions of grumbling, often pick the titles without much input from the author.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Also, the stuff they are calling attention to is not, in fact, in any galaxy, and is monstrously bigger than any galaxy.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  12 million light years is near to Earth, as galaxies go. The overwhelming majority of the hundreds of billions of other galaxies are hundreds to thousands of times farther away.
  - lifeformed 5y ago
    Mentioning Earth is just weirdly specific, a mismatched precision. It's like saying a truck almost hit my left kidney, instead of just hitting me.
    - leephillips 5y ago
hinkley 5y ago
This shape reminds me of some simulations I've seen of a star falling into a black hole. Is that a coincidence, or did this SMBH eat one of those enormous stars that's the diameter of Venus' orbit?
- ncmncm 5y ago
  More probably it ate thousands if not millions of stars. It would be tricky to get it to swallow a star so big before that went supernova, while on the way in, on its own initiative. Whether the resulting black hole would then be swallowed up, or also be flung out at near light-speed with the rest of the ejecta, is an interesting question.
- mdoms 5y ago
  > The emission is powered by a central black hole in the galaxy Centaurus A, about 12 million light years away. > As the black hole feeds on in-falling gas, it ejects material at near light-speed, causing ‘radio bubbles’ to grow over hundreds of millions of years.
- ignoramous 5y ago
  > Is that a coincidence, or did this SMBH eat one of those enormous stars that's the diameter of Venus' orbit? au contraire, enormous (in terms of mass not volume) but dying Neutron stars are so compressed under their own gravity, some are barely 12 to 25 kilometers in diameter of highly condensed Iron and other stable atomic arrangements, and may be spinning 40,000 times per minute on their own axis. Sometimes, there are two of those in a binary system, orbiting each other, on a collision course for a Kilonova, spraying out bazillion tonnes of star and planet making substances across a Galaxy. A blackhole gulping Neutron Stars down would make for an interesting event!
natch 5y ago
A black hole is ejecting stuff, is it? I suppose they mean to say that the black hole is ejecting stuff from its vicinity.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  "science journalism" is almost always more confusion than enlightenment
- sliken 5y ago
  Heh, well sort of, the blackhole is the engine that converts matter into energy, which results in the observed jets. No blackhole, no jets. Seems a bit pedantic to mention that the observed jets aren't crossing the event horizon.
Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago
Define near... Reading the headline I was thinking in terms of AU, not millions of light years
- lmilcin 5y ago
  We only have one supermassive BH in Milky Way. Any other supermassive BH must live in a center of another galaxy. So a person that understands the topic should immediately understand we are talking about relatively close galaxy.
  - tome 5y ago
    > a person that understands the topic should immediately understand we are talking about relatively close galaxy. Sure, but a person who doesn't would receive the message more clearly if it were stated as "Supermassive black hole eruption near milky way". Otherwise I could write "Supermassive black hole eruption near New York" and be equally correct. I suspect the potential for misunderstanding was the reason the headline was chosen in this form, however ...
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      12 million light years is around the corner in cosmic terms. Andromeda is our neighbour is about two million or so light years.
    - feoren 5y ago
      I fully agree that "near the White House", "near Washington", "near Earth", "near the solar system", and "near the Milky Way" all convey strongly different ideas of what "near" actually means. However, I think in this case they were basically going for "surprisingly near", or "near us". I think it's reasonable to say that this is unusually close to us.
      - eitland 5y ago
        Well, the headline as it currently stands includes both the earth and the moon which definitely primes the thoughts. I know research on priming has got some well deserved criticism, but there is no doubt basic framing works and this article either plays this effect for purpose or is scarily unaware of it.
alok-g 5y ago
Wow! This has a size of about 1.7 million lightyears, which is nine times the size of the milky way, and nearing the distance to Andromeda which is about 2.5 million light years.
- geuis 5y ago
  12 million is much further away than 2.5.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Only when you ignore the overwhelming majority of hundreds of millions of galaxies, hundreds and thousands of times farther away than that. But yes, farther out than Andromeda.
    - SweetLullaby 5y ago
      :DD
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - saltcured 5y ago
    The earlier post is comparing the size (1.7 million) to the distance (2.5 million) to give a sense of scale.
rbanffy 5y ago
I wonder what the radiation environment in the galaxy is. How bright a galactic center black hole can be before the whole galaxy becomes uninhabitable by something like us.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Galaxies are hazardous places to be. E.g., a minor hiccup on a magnetar 500 ly from Earth would sterilize it. Earth, that is. One might drift into range any time; Sol has probably been that near to one for a million years at least several times, as it orbits inside the Milky Way every 200 million years. Any civilization interested in longevity would get the hell away from any galaxy as soon as it could manage.
  - leephillips 5y ago
    We need to get on that magnetar defense.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      Let's build a Faraday cage for the Solar System! Now, on a more serious tone, we may want some contingency plans with underground environments and something to preserve some life for long enough we could be able to re-seed a biosphere on the surface. Useful for ice ages too. Now imagine it as the start of a story - we terraform Mars, or Venus, only to trigger a re-seeding of the now friendly environment by long buried machines left by a dead civilization.
      - sitkack 5y ago
        Who says we haven't been making our way out for awhile now? I also like the theory that a previous civilization was all soft biology based and that its tech would leave no trace. Speaking of underground environments, Mercury would be an excellent location. http://www.einstein-schrodinger.com/mercury_colony.html http://www.einstein-schrodinger.com/mercury_colony.html
geuis 5y ago
Hey mods, for the sake of scientific clarity can the title be edited to either remove “near Earth”, or to indicate “NOT near Earth”. It’s a clickbait addition to the title by the original authors that is already causing confusion in the comments here. The galaxy in question is 12 million light years away. That is (literally) not astronomically close.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  For galaxies, it pretty much is. It’s about 5 times as far as our nearest neighbour. There aren’t that many big galaxies in the radius.
  - jquery 5y ago
    Then the title should say near the Milky Way, not near Earth. The title confused the hell out of me until I read the article.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      When the title said "supermassive black hole eruption" instead of "Sag A* eruption" it was pretty clear the supermassive black hole was not our own supermassive black hole, but some other galaxy's. I was curious whether it could be Andromeda's SMBH flaring, but very certain it wouldn't be our own.
dnautics 5y ago
the relative sizes of things you have trouble seeing due to dimness or can't see due to wavelength is very wild to me, for example the andromeda galaxy (you can only, at best, see its nucleus even with a proper telescope or binoculars): https://slate.com/technology/2014/01/moon-and-andromeda-relative-size-in-the-sky.html https://slate.com/technology/2014/01/moon-and-andromeda-rela...
latchkey 5y ago
I just watched "Don't look up" last night...
lisper 5y ago
"Near" here means: 12 million light years away. So not exactly a day trip.
sigmaprimus 5y ago
I wonder if this is an example of an amazing event in the universe or an example of the amazing improvements in observational technologies. Will this be a much more common observation in six months or so when the James Webb telescope comes online?
iJohnDoe 5y ago
> a blackhole with a mass of 55 million suns. I normally don’t put much emphasis or thought of our space or size in the galaxy or universe. However, it is very revealing how we are very much “a pale blue dot” within perfect distance to our sun and moon, and are a very special species on an amazing planet. We are not insignificant. Indeed, we are the exact opposite.

58 points by wglb 5y ago

Spanning 8 degrees, 12 million light years away? That's insane. A feature that's 1.67 million light years across? That's insane. That's a sixth of the size of the entire local cluster.

dclowd9901 5y ago
I was surprised that the moon only measures two degrees across the sky!
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Half the width of your thumb held out at arm's length. Sun, likewise, of course. So these radio lobes reach out another moon-width from both sides of your thumb.
- shagie 5y ago
  As noted, 0.5° across... but this misconception is in part because 360° or even 180° is really big when you're sitting at the center of it. I believe part of this misconception comes from that when we look at something, we're only paying attain to +/- 15° while the bifocal range is 120° and the full field of view with both eyes is about 200°. Additionally, the field of view of the photographs that involve the sun or moon are often in the 5° to 15° range. That narrow range photograph - https://www.deviantart.com/shagie/art/Crescent-Moonset-7082381 https://www.deviantart.com/shagie/art/Crescent-Moonset-70823... and that has a 3.4° field of view on the short axis. This is closer to the regular field of view - https://www.deviantart.com/shagie/art/Moon-and-sunset-3181113 https://www.deviantart.com/shagie/art/Moon-and-sunset-318111... though I shot it portrait rather than landscape. That has a 27° field of view on the short axis and a 40° field of view on the long axis. Another aspect of the moon and its size and the sky sphere - it moves at a fairly good clip. The sun is easier to think of though, it moves through 360° is 24h. That gives 15°/h or 0.25°/m. Every two minutes, the sun moves a solar diameter across the sky the moon has a similar amount of motion over a short period of time. This makes it difficult to take long exposures of the moon without a tracking mount.
  - sliken 5y ago
    Heh, it's easy to think these days that the moon is larger than you think. Especially with so many articles showing huge detailed pictures of the moon. Try taking a picture of the moon with a cell phone (even one with the best in the market camera) and be prepared to be disappointed.
    - shagie 5y ago
      My first experience with "well, that didn't work" was about 30 years ago. I had a 35mm point and shoot (fixed focus too) camera. I shot one roll at night trying to photograph the full moon. They didn't even cut the film. When looking at the negatives, all that you could see on a long strip of film was an occasional very small black dot. From this, I learned two things: (1) The moon is much smaller in the sky than you think it is. (2) Take a picture of a white wall or similar thing to expose an entire frame so that additional frames can be calculated form that first (or last or both) frame and the proper cuts of the film can be made.
      - sliken 5y ago
        I've got a Pixel 6 pro, 4x optical zoom, decent sensor, and a astrophotography mode. It does take some nice sky photos, but the moon is just too small.
        shagie 5y ago
        Cameras on phones just aren't designed for the narrow field of view that much of astrophotography uses. The thing to look up is "wide field astrophotography" - but even then, you get into issues. While it's a little dated (digital has come a long way), if you are interested in it with a "real" camera... hunt up a copy of Heavenly Bodies: The Photographer's Guide to Astrophotography by Bert P Krages.
        wglb 5y ago
        My canon SX 50 does nicely, filling the viewfinder with the full moon

Grakel 5y ago

Apparently 12 million light-years is near Earth. I know it's lame to comment on the single stupid thing in an article, but this is absurd.

jessriedel 5y ago
Yea, "near Milky Way" would have been better. The closest galaxy (Andromeda) is 2.5 million light-years, so 12 million to Centaurus A is pretty close. It's also the fifth brightest galaxy in the sky, so "near" in that sense too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurus_A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurus_A
- hinkley 5y ago
  "In nearby galaxy" probably got canned by the editors, who as we all know from many many sessions of grumbling, often pick the titles without much input from the author.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Also, the stuff they are calling attention to is not, in fact, in any galaxy, and is monstrously bigger than any galaxy.
ncmncm 5y ago
12 million light years is near to Earth, as galaxies go. The overwhelming majority of the hundreds of billions of other galaxies are hundreds to thousands of times farther away.
- lifeformed 5y ago
  Mentioning Earth is just weirdly specific, a mismatched precision. It's like saying a truck almost hit my left kidney, instead of just hitting me.
  - leephillips 5y ago

hinkley 5y ago

This shape reminds me of some simulations I've seen of a star falling into a black hole. Is that a coincidence, or did this SMBH eat one of those enormous stars that's the diameter of Venus' orbit?

ncmncm 5y ago
More probably it ate thousands if not millions of stars. It would be tricky to get it to swallow a star so big before that went supernova, while on the way in, on its own initiative. Whether the resulting black hole would then be swallowed up, or also be flung out at near light-speed with the rest of the ejecta, is an interesting question.
mdoms 5y ago
> The emission is powered by a central black hole in the galaxy Centaurus A, about 12 million light years away. > As the black hole feeds on in-falling gas, it ejects material at near light-speed, causing ‘radio bubbles’ to grow over hundreds of millions of years.
ignoramous 5y ago
> Is that a coincidence, or did this SMBH eat one of those enormous stars that's the diameter of Venus' orbit? au contraire, enormous (in terms of mass not volume) but dying Neutron stars are so compressed under their own gravity, some are barely 12 to 25 kilometers in diameter of highly condensed Iron and other stable atomic arrangements, and may be spinning 40,000 times per minute on their own axis. Sometimes, there are two of those in a binary system, orbiting each other, on a collision course for a Kilonova, spraying out bazillion tonnes of star and planet making substances across a Galaxy. A blackhole gulping Neutron Stars down would make for an interesting event!

natch 5y ago

A black hole is ejecting stuff, is it? I suppose they mean to say that the black hole is ejecting stuff from its vicinity.

LegitShady 5y ago
"science journalism" is almost always more confusion than enlightenment
sliken 5y ago
Heh, well sort of, the blackhole is the engine that converts matter into energy, which results in the observed jets. No blackhole, no jets. Seems a bit pedantic to mention that the observed jets aren't crossing the event horizon.

Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago

Define near... Reading the headline I was thinking in terms of AU, not millions of light years

lmilcin 5y ago
We only have one supermassive BH in Milky Way. Any other supermassive BH must live in a center of another galaxy. So a person that understands the topic should immediately understand we are talking about relatively close galaxy.
- tome 5y ago
  > a person that understands the topic should immediately understand we are talking about relatively close galaxy. Sure, but a person who doesn't would receive the message more clearly if it were stated as "Supermassive black hole eruption near milky way". Otherwise I could write "Supermassive black hole eruption near New York" and be equally correct. I suspect the potential for misunderstanding was the reason the headline was chosen in this form, however ...
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    12 million light years is around the corner in cosmic terms. Andromeda is our neighbour is about two million or so light years.
  - feoren 5y ago
    I fully agree that "near the White House", "near Washington", "near Earth", "near the solar system", and "near the Milky Way" all convey strongly different ideas of what "near" actually means. However, I think in this case they were basically going for "surprisingly near", or "near us". I think it's reasonable to say that this is unusually close to us.
    - eitland 5y ago
      Well, the headline as it currently stands includes both the earth and the moon which definitely primes the thoughts. I know research on priming has got some well deserved criticism, but there is no doubt basic framing works and this article either plays this effect for purpose or is scarily unaware of it.

alok-g 5y ago

Wow! This has a size of about 1.7 million lightyears, which is nine times the size of the milky way, and nearing the distance to Andromeda which is about 2.5 million light years.

geuis 5y ago
12 million is much further away than 2.5.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Only when you ignore the overwhelming majority of hundreds of millions of galaxies, hundreds and thousands of times farther away than that. But yes, farther out than Andromeda.
  - SweetLullaby 5y ago
    :DD
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- saltcured 5y ago
  The earlier post is comparing the size (1.7 million) to the distance (2.5 million) to give a sense of scale.

rbanffy 5y ago

I wonder what the radiation environment in the galaxy is. How bright a galactic center black hole can be before the whole galaxy becomes uninhabitable by something like us.

ncmncm 5y ago
Galaxies are hazardous places to be. E.g., a minor hiccup on a magnetar 500 ly from Earth would sterilize it. Earth, that is. One might drift into range any time; Sol has probably been that near to one for a million years at least several times, as it orbits inside the Milky Way every 200 million years. Any civilization interested in longevity would get the hell away from any galaxy as soon as it could manage.
- leephillips 5y ago
  We need to get on that magnetar defense.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    Let's build a Faraday cage for the Solar System! Now, on a more serious tone, we may want some contingency plans with underground environments and something to preserve some life for long enough we could be able to re-seed a biosphere on the surface. Useful for ice ages too. Now imagine it as the start of a story - we terraform Mars, or Venus, only to trigger a re-seeding of the now friendly environment by long buried machines left by a dead civilization.
    - sitkack 5y ago
      Who says we haven't been making our way out for awhile now? I also like the theory that a previous civilization was all soft biology based and that its tech would leave no trace. Speaking of underground environments, Mercury would be an excellent location. http://www.einstein-schrodinger.com/mercury_colony.html http://www.einstein-schrodinger.com/mercury_colony.html

geuis 5y ago

Hey mods, for the sake of scientific clarity can the title be edited to either remove “near Earth”, or to indicate “NOT near Earth”. It’s a clickbait addition to the title by the original authors that is already causing confusion in the comments here. The galaxy in question is 12 million light years away. That is (literally) not astronomically close.

rbanffy 5y ago
For galaxies, it pretty much is. It’s about 5 times as far as our nearest neighbour. There aren’t that many big galaxies in the radius.
- jquery 5y ago
  Then the title should say near the Milky Way, not near Earth. The title confused the hell out of me until I read the article.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    When the title said "supermassive black hole eruption" instead of "Sag A* eruption" it was pretty clear the supermassive black hole was not our own supermassive black hole, but some other galaxy's. I was curious whether it could be Andromeda's SMBH flaring, but very certain it wouldn't be our own.

dnautics 5y ago

the relative sizes of things you have trouble seeing due to dimness or can't see due to wavelength is very wild to me, for example the andromeda galaxy (you can only, at best, see its nucleus even with a proper telescope or binoculars): https://slate.com/technology/2014/01/moon-and-andromeda-relative-size-in-the-sky.html https://slate.com/technology/2014/01/moon-and-andromeda-rela...

latchkey 5y ago

I just watched "Don't look up" last night...

lisper 5y ago

"Near" here means: 12 million light years away. So not exactly a day trip.

sigmaprimus 5y ago

I wonder if this is an example of an amazing event in the universe or an example of the amazing improvements in observational technologies. Will this be a much more common observation in six months or so when the James Webb telescope comes online?

iJohnDoe 5y ago

> a blackhole with a mass of 55 million suns. I normally don’t put much emphasis or thought of our space or size in the galaxy or universe. However, it is very revealing how we are very much “a pale blue dot” within perfect distance to our sun and moon, and are a very special species on an amazing planet. We are not insignificant. Indeed, we are the exact opposite.