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Bright flash is a black hole jet pointing at Earth, astronomers say
- wigster 4y agoit's the focused beam of tortured souls escaping the event horizon that worries me.
- ordu 4y agoWhy do you think they were tortured? Maybe they were ejected for heavy drinking while waiting in a queue to a paradise. We do not know what is inside of a black hole, but funny ways of matter around a black hole seems like a result of drunkinness. How one can miss black hole while falling into it? Try to miss Earth while falling on it. No amount of gin seem to be enough. But they somehow managed to miss a black hole which is much heavier than Earth. They used a tremendous amount of gin to get into the right state of a mind. No wonder they were stripped of their right to a paradise and ejected from a queue.
- nathcd 4y agopaper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.16537.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.16537.pdf
- gammarator 4y agoHere’s the paper by the discovery team: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.16530 https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.16530
- cuSetanta 4y agoTypically Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) with the jets pointed directly at Earth are referred to as Blazars. (https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8300/7754600044_e7635a1c8f.jpg https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8300/7754600044_e7635a1c8f.jp...) But this event seems to be something a little different. Its a lot closer to us than a lot of blazars typically are, and the emission seems to infer a different source than is typically seens for blazars. Quite an interesting paper, will be cool to see how this might change our understanding of AGN and accretion of matter onto such objects.
- jcims 4y ago>referred to as Blazars For me, legitimately one of the best names for anything ever. First time I heard the word it gave me goosebumps lol.
- mongol 4y agoHow about blazer? Any reaction to that?
- zikduruqe 4y agoI'm partial to Thagomizer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomizer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomizer
- unsupp0rted 4y ago> The term thagomizer was coined by Gary Larson in jest. In a 1982 The Far Side comic, a group of cavemen are taught by a caveman lecturer that the spikes on a stegosaur's tail were named "after the late Thag Simmons".
- mattkevan 4y agoMy 5 year old surprised me when she pointed to the spikes on a dinosaur tail and said ‘that’s the thagomizer’. I knew about the cartoon and that it’d been adopted as the official term, but somehow wasn’t expecting it to be taught in primary schools as standard dino anatomy.
- LegitShady 4y agothagomizer is a lot more fun to say than something technical like "distal tail bone spikes" or something similar.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y agoDistal Coccygeal Osteophytes
- baobabKoodaa 4y agoWhen they say "pointing straight toward Earth", is that hyperbole? Or are they actually saying that by pure random chance, out of all the possible directions this thing could have taken, it just happens to be pointed directly at earth?
- cogwheel 4y agoThe beam is surely wider than the planet so there's a large range of "straight toward"
- cuSetanta 4y agoYeah this is pretty much the case. The important thing is that the light from the beam is sufficicently bright that it is not possible to resolve the surrounding region of space to see more detail.
- baobabKoodaa 4y agoIf I point a flashlight directly at you, that's different from me pointing the flashlight at the person standing next to you. Even though in both cases the beam will light you up.
- dotnet00 4y agoBut that becomes effectively the same thing if the flashlight is being pointed in your direction from 10km away and it's reasonable to just describe it as pointing at you. Coming from 8 billion ly away, the beam is probably wide enough that it would appear to be pointed at the Milky Way in general.
- dan_mctree 4y agoIt should be at least broad enough to compensate for some movement of the earth, considering it was observed for at least some days
- bombcar 4y agoIt's 8 billion light years away, even if the beam was very focused by the time it reached us it is probably tens of thousands of lightyears wide.
- waltbosz 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-fashioned_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-fashioned_(short_story) An Asimov story about stranded astro-miners who throw rocks into a black hole to generate x-rays with the hopes that they will be spotted by observers back on Earth. The throws are timed to spell out S-O-S.
- Mistletoe 4y agoSorry for a stupid question but I’ve seen it repeated on the internet many times that we can never observe anything actually falling into a black hole because it takes forever to actually fall in due to time lengthening the closer it gets. Is that true? It has never made sense to me, since we see effects of black holes all the time.
- dotancohen 4y agoThe object falling in has its time dilated to forever - it will never actually experience the "getting there". Outside observers, on the other hand, will observe the "getting there" just as if the black hole were any other large mass. Or do I have that backwards...
- birdiesanders 4y agoBackwards
- dotancohen 4y agoThank you!
- WrtCdEvrydy 4y agoYes, the outside observers can see the item falling into the blackhole while the object experiences more and more time dilation. If you were falling into a wormhole, you would die of old age before getting there while outside observers would see you fall in quickly.
- beedeebeedee 4y agoIs this going to annihilate us? I didn't see them mention any safety risks, but it sounds similar to a quasar to me (a non-astronomer), and I think if one of those is pointing at us, we're toast. If they just detected the light, and the matter is going 99.9% of the speed of light, does that mean we're toast tomorrow? Next week? Next year?
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agoIt's 8 billion light years away. We'll be fine.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- insanitybit 4y agoFor now!
- 317070 4y agoIf the matter is trailing at 99.99% the speed of light as reported, it gives us 800k years.
- zdyn5 4y agoWouldn’t it give us way more than that? If it were traveling at 100% the speed of light it would take 8 billion years right?
- sp332 4y agoThe light has already taken 8 billion years to get here. The particles have also been traveling for that time and are only 800,000 years away now.
- luxuryballs 4y ago“Hey Siri, set a reminder for…”
- geeky4qwerty 4y ago"From a rough calculation, the flash appeared to give off more light than 1,000 trillion suns." Can any space geeks chime in on this one? Does this mean the emission of light from the sun at a single point in time x 10^15? My brain pretty much divides by zero even trying to comprehend such a large number and I'm just trying to grasp the relationship of the emitted light to our sun.
- londons_explore 4y agoThat would be assuming the same amount of light was emitted in all directions. But we have no indication that that was the case.
- jvanderbot 4y agoI roughly translate this to 10^15 x more photons per square meter of surface area at some standard distance.
- cuSetanta 4y agoAs others have said, its not quite the same as the Sun's output, but it is still an incredible amount of light. I have studied blazars fairly extensively in the past and you are right that the brain cant really fathom the 'real world' appearance of these things. I resort to just thinking in terms of number of photons and avoid thinking about the rest, as it tends to result in a lot of existential dread and drinking.
- dredmorbius 4y agoOne way of thinking about this is in terms of incident sunlight at Earth's orbit. A trillion is a rather large number. Some quick maths says that 1,000 trillion cm^2 is 100,000 km^2, or a region roughly 315 km on a side (195 miles), or a circle with a radius of about 126 km (77 mi). Alternatively, if you consider sunlight falling on a patch of ground for one second, the amount reaching it over 1 trillion seconds would take about 32,000 years. So think in terms of a very large magnifying glass (I'd suggest considering a Fresnel lens for economy's sake), or a very long-term accumulator.
- 4y ago
- ck2 4y agoHmm. If an alien race a million years older than humans eventually figured out how to make synthetic wormholes on demand for FTL when no other method existed, can we theorize what the endpoint might look like? (this is a "fun" but not kidding question)
- dotnet00 4y agoOne idea is that they'd be one-directional, with a black hole on one end and a white hole on the other end. But considering that we haven't really seen any evidence of white holes existing, such a thing probably isn't possible. Other than that, a simple traversable wormhole entrance/exit would just look like a sphere where you see the other side sort of 'mapped' onto the surface.
- ck2 4y agoOh wow, were the Hollywood versions in Contact and Interstellar vaguely based on that science? Will have to watch them again this weekend and double-check.
- dotnet00 4y agoI wouldn't necessarily say they're based on science since I don't really think there's enough concrete science on wormholes to say what they would look like precisely (although Interstellar did put some effort into visual accuracy: https://cerncourier.com/a/building-gargantua/ https://cerncourier.com/a/building-gargantua/). My reasoning is that just like a circle is formed on a 2d surface when 'bridging' two parts of it (the pencil through folded paper analogy), a bridge on a 3d surface should have a sphere as the hole (or maybe since it's technically a space-time bridge, it should be a hypersphere, which would still appear as a sphere to us 3d observers). Then, to not tear apart anything going through, it'd need to conserve 'symmetry' (so something that goes in comes out unchanged), so the light would go through unchanged, making it just appear like the view of the other side is mapped to the surface.
- ionwake 4y ago(I can give you a “short” but not short answer to this)
- swamp40 4y ago> jet speed is 99.99% the speed of light Does that mean a wave of particles is coming at us right behind the light flash?
- Renevith 4y agoThat was my first thought too. But even at that speed, we have quite a bit of time. Since the particles are 0.01% slower than the light that just reached us, the particles would arrive in: 8,500,000,000 light years away * 0.01% speed of light = 850,000 years. Humanity will be unrecognizable by that point.
- grayfaced 4y agoWouldn't the galatic rotation mean the earth will be somewhere far away when the jet travels that far?
- suzzer99 4y agoYes, that and both galaxies careening through space on different trajectories.
- garblegarble 4y agoThat got me wondering how far we'd move - if my maths is correct then in 850,000 years time our solar system will have travelled 652 light years around the galactic core (230 km/sec * 850,000 years)!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- d0mine 4y agoHow wide is the beam? (given how far it started) Light-years? Is it still dangerous at this point? (If its energy is spread over a giant area radius billions light-years)
- mynegation 4y ago
- 7373737373 4y agoHow wide is this jet here? Does it cover the entire Milky Way?
- moloch-hai 4y ago8.5 billion light years away, vs. ~100,000 light years across. To cover the whole galaxy, from a point source it would need to spread out just 1 part in 100,000. So, probably. Yes, technically our galaxy is a lot bigger than 100,000 ly, but the part somebody looking out from Andromeda could see isn't.
- denton-scratch 4y ago> Typically, such bright flashes in the sky are gamma-ray bursts—extreme jets of X-ray emissions that spew from the collapse of massive stars. Is that right? Surely gamma ray bursts are gamma rays, not X-rays. At least, shouldn't it say "extreme bursts of X-rays and gamma rays [...]"?
- monocasa 4y agoGRBs start, as their name suggest, as a burst of gamma rays, but have long tails of emiting of x-rays and other lower energy photons that we're more likely to notice.
- subsubzero 4y agoWonder if this burst could have been seen with the naked eye? They mentioned it was visible on multiple spectrums.
- dsq 4y agoI am also curious about this. I would sometimes look up while walking my dog and wonder if by chance I woukd see a sudden addition to the night sky.
- habibur 4y ago> 8.5 billion lights years away—more than halfway across the universe That was the first number I was looking for. Not a threat to earth. It's not even in our galaxy.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoI don't know, its pretty bright. Maybe this periodic flash-fry is what created life on earth!
- winReInstall 4y agoIf you could controll the direction of a black hole, you could use it to "disinfect" the neighbourhood or send messages.
- Victerius 4y agoIt's 8.5 billion light years away. It would be like aiming a water hose at Mars from low Earth orbit.
- backtoyoujim 4y agoso given this tool we would either murder or flirt can there be anything so human ?
- dredmorbius 4y agoI've wondered whether or not black holes or cosmic masers might be used for very-long-range communications or signalling.
- amelius 4y agoWhat is the probability of something so far away pointing straight towards Earth? What is the angle in which this phenomenon spreads out into space?
- anigbrowl 4y ago> From a rough calculation, the flash appeared to give off more light than 1,000 trillion suns Not a single astronomical photgraph
- BlueTemplar 4y agoOverexposure issues...
- dredmorbius 4y agoIn all likelihood the observation and analysis are based on sensing data rather than images. If you could see something, it would be a dot next to a smudge --- the jet and its adjacent galaxy.
- ourmandave 4y agoKurzgesagt just did a vid on black holes and how close they have to be before we're f'd. The Most Extreme Explosion in the Universe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4DF3j4saCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4DF3j4saCE
- umarniz 4y agoWant to point out how incredibly good the website phys.org is. I was first introduced to it over 15 years ago and remember visiting it using dial-up internet from Pakistan as a teenager to learn about the latest developments in physics. Gem of a resource that is still going strong.
- jschveibinz 4y ago“Pointing directly toward earth” …hmmm. In what possible frame of reference could anything be pointed directly toward earth for longer than a moment in space and time? We are traveling through space and time in multiple frames of reference at a tremendous rate. This confuses me.
- pigtailgirl 4y agohttps://telescope.live/sites/default/files/styles/photo_w1024x2/public/inline-images/at%202022cmc.png https://telescope.live/sites/default/files/styles/photo_w102... very bright ^^ https://telescope.live/blog/transient-flash-identified-distant-tidal-disruption-event https://telescope.live/blog/transient-flash-identified-dista...
- freddealmeida 4y ago* blackholes are not confirmed science. It is theory and little evidence supports the theory. * Math is not reality, it is a description of reality that should require evidence * this could be many other things including plasma
- cthalupa 4y agoLittle evidence? We've got pictures of them a this point, friend. While we are not entirely sure on all of the specifics, and some things, such as the singularity, are likely a bit different than our current theories suggest, there's mountains of evidence that support the existence of black holes, or at the very least, something that is very very very very very very very similar to them on the macro level.
- luxuryballs 4y agoor at least something that we have named “black hole” when some light follows a specific pattern after traveling through space for billions of years, no reason to assume that this is how it looked when it originally departed
- freddealmeida 4y agomaybe? could be? possibly? Highly doubtful and impossible to verify
- wumms 4y ago> 8.5 billion lights years away—more than halfway across the universe Why is it halfway across? The universe's diameter is 93 billion ly. Shouldn't 8.5 billion be more like "ten percent across"?
- anotheraccount9 4y ago(I'm not an astrophysicist). They possibly are referring to the initial age of the universe times the speed of light (13.8 billion light-years), as if it was static. Like you infer, "[...] stuff is everywhere, light goes at c, stars and galaxies move, and the Universe is expanding." https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/02/23/if-the-universe-is-13-8-billion-years-old-how-can-we-see-46-billion-light-years-away/?sh=494c7e2d1303 https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/02/23/if-t...
- nicksrose7224 4y agoI think it's more likely they got it wrong and are referring to what they assume the size of the universe is. It's hard to grasp why the observable universe is 92 billion ly in diameter
- yayr 4y agouniverse is a relative word, and typically treats us at being at the center (which in the whole of reality is somewhat unlikely). So it only describes that part of reality observable by us. 8,5 bn ly refers to roughly half distance to all of the observable events in that observable reality at the time these events occured. Since 3D space presumably expands, it would now take much more time for any event in our observable "universe" to reach from one end of the observation limit to the other... by the way - if you want to go down further that rabbit hole a good place to start is to search for "levels of multiverse"
- moloch-hai 4y agoThe big untouched mystery is how these things collimate the beam so exactly. In order for all the mass to end up going in exactly one direction, so focused, something would have to get them started off that way. Any sort of thermal phenomenon would need a parabolic reflector/nozzle. Currently favored is some sort of electromagnetic process that works like a particle accelerator, applying a linear electric field to highly-ionized nuclei over thousands or millions of km. The "geysers" coming out of Enceladus would likewise need parabolic nozzles to stay collimated, so must be similarly electromagnetic. Unfortunately the notion was first promoted by reviled "electric universe" enthusiasts, so astrophysicists need to file the serial numbers off before they can acknowledge it.
- blackboxlogic 4y agoCould gravitational forces between particles in a beam tighten a beam as it travels?
- moloch-hai 4y agoYes. Curiously, this would work even for a sufficiently intense beam of light. It is called "self-focusing", and has been proposed for use in an interstellar transport network. Your vehicles would need not to be ripped apart to individual nucleons by the intensity of the beam.
- dustingetz 4y agoChatGPT has made contact
- mensetmanusman 4y agoHow many years advance notice would we have before we knew that such an event was our fate? To be eaten by a black hole…
- luxuryballs 4y agoI personally believe that astronomer buzzwords are even worse than business/sales/tech buzzwords. The idea that they are so confident that something is a “black hole” which is also entirely made up, is laughable. It’s just old light, why assume it represents anything at all? Couldn’t the light have been distorted during the long voyage? Maybe all light looks like “galaxies and black holes” after it travels for a billion years through space.
- godmode2019 4y agoThis sort of thing really makes me feel uncomfortable. What are the odds of this hitting us, during our lifetime with the technology to record it. Seems far fetched.