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Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars
- irrational 4y agoImagine intelligent life arising on a planet around one of those stars. I wonder how long it would take their astronomers to figure out where they were.
- claritise 4y agoBasically three body problem
- intrasight 4y agoIf there is intelligent life, isnt it likely that there will be similarity in the stars and planets. And those folk have a galactic superhighway!
- irrational 4y agoWould there be a similarity of stars? We see lots of stars because we are in the middle of a galaxy, but they are outside of a galaxy. They could see the galaxy they came from in parts of their sky, but would it really be like actually being in the galaxy? I'd imagine not. It might only be visible from one hemisphere of the planet, depending on how the ecliptic was aligned. The other hemisphere might only see black, with maybe one or more moons and other planets.
- dividefuel 4y agoThis would be an interesting premise for a science fiction story. You could imagine a species realizing that the only way to survive long term is to keep hopping to new star systems every billion or so years. And when they get ready to hop to another system for the first time, they realize almost all the viable star systems are already colonized by past species who came to the same conclusion
- brotchie 4y agoGreg Egan’s Incandescence is along these lines except replace star in the trail of a black hole with asymmetric asteroid around a black hole accretion disk.
- askvictor 4y agoI read that, but have either forgotten, or missed the entire black hole thing. I think, for any given Egan novel, I miss about half of the ideas while trying to wrap my head around the other half, but he's still one of my favourite authors.
- alex_young 4y agoLink to actual paper with actual images: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/acba86 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/acba86
- nawgz 4y agoIncredibly cool. That is an absolutely massive structure, twice the length our Milky Way is across. Those images are like no astronomy images I've ever seen.
- i-use-nixos-btw 4y agoI get incredibly frustrated with popular science articles that use only artist’s impressions and avoid the real images. To me, the real images are much more exciting. You don’t need fake clarity and fake colour when you’re seeing a (candidate) high speed black hole sucking the life out of some fricking ginormous balls of flaming nuclear fusion.
- elihu 4y agoThis article is even worse, that it shows an illustration without a caption identifying it as an illustration, which is very misleading. (Later they show it again with the caption saying it's an illustration.)
- residentcoder 4y agoIn their defense, NASA did use the same artistic rendition...
- elihu 4y agoNASA used that image, but the first words under it were "this is an artist's impression of..." which is the right way to label things if you don't want people mistaking an illustration for real data.
- oldgradstudent 4y ago
- pknomad 4y agoHuh. That's a very interesting find. It's been a while since I took Astronomy and Physics but I thought you get black hole after massive stars fuse all lighter elements up until [Fe]? It must have pulled enough lighter elements in its path of travel to leave enough for star formation in its streaks.
- LadyCailin 4y agoBlack holes at galactic cores likely have different origin mechanisms.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- imoverclocked 4y agoI sort of love that these new findings are still largely from human eyeballs.
- baq 4y agoYeah, still plenty of room for the classic “that’s funny…” which sounds like exactly what’s happened here. Love it
- mindyhausler 4y ago[flagged]
- ftxbro 4y agoThat picture is amazing! The real ones at the very bottom of the article were OK too I guess.
- andrewstuart 4y agoIf you lived on a planet going around one of those stars it sure would be hard to make sense of the universe. "Oh I have it! In addition to all the incomprehensible things in the universe, we happen to live in a star system that is extremely, extremely rare and exeptional, unlike the rest of the universe!"
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kevinventullo 4y agoTo be fair, that does seem to describe the existence of life on our own planet.
- andrewstuart 4y agoI don't think so - in every direction we look things appear largely to be the same. It seems entirely reasonable that extends to life. The only limiting factor is we cannot see other planets to find out.
- account-5 4y agoI think they might be referring to the fact the human species seems to think it's exceptional and has a unique place in the universe.
- darwinwhy 4y agoIs that a reasonable assumption to make? I don't think we have any evidence of other places we look being "largely the same" with respect to life conduciveness. It took billions of years for our own planet to achieve multicellular life, which is a significant fraction of our best estimate of the lifetime of the entire universe up to this point.
- jenadine 4y agoBut the universe is big and there are billions of billions of other planets which could very well have similar conditions, that also exist for billions of years
- unrealp 4y agoI wonder if this is an opportunity to detect intelligent life. If the black hole is affecting any intelligent life on the way, they might do something to save themselves or their planet, which might be detectable?
- chasil 4y agoUnlikely. It has been seen no where else. And what would we do if we saw it? It's likely beyond the cosmological horizon, meaning that a reply is impossible.
- iamgopal 4y agoOr this itself just two alien race fighting with each other. Wait till we see another black hole going other way.
- pyinstallwoes 4y agoOr an act of creation in cosmic husbandry by some extremely advanced intelligence
- blacksmith_tb 4y agoIf they could do something on a scale to stop (or even avoid) a runaway black hole they'd have to be enormously powerful. I would think even for species well beyond our capabilities the only option would be to flee.
- dontupvoteme 4y agoBy our current understanding the only thing one could do to a black hole is increase its mass (useless) or attempt to change its path gravitationally (requiring a massive amount of gravity -> requiring a massive, massive amount of energy) Fleeing probably makes the most sense for any species.
- Razengan 4y agoWhat if this is CAUSED by intelligent life? Maybe this is part of a galactic-scale engineering project? Actual pic btw: https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01GWQ1FTQCCZS72F2GPD4QTJXK.png https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01GWQ1FTQCCZS72F2GPD4QTJXK.png
- quickthrower2 4y agoWhat I don’t understand is where the material for the stars is coming from? Is there that much dust in deep space? Or did it collect it from the galaxy?
- chasil 4y agoDiscarded material from the accretion disc, or (well, more likely) material that was more loosely gravitationally bound. A galactic core has a lot of mass that could be stolen.
- scotty79 4y agoI wonder how long for this carried along gas to get depleted.
- mrsmee89 4y agoI had the same question! From what I can gather, the black hole is plowing through gas, when the gas gets too close to the black hole, it gets sucked in and forms a disk around the black hole. As the gas disk spirals in towards the black hole, it gets heated up and shocked, causing it to fragment and form clumps. These clumps eventually collapse under their own gravity, forming stars. How cool is that!
- tehforsch 4y agoThe primary stuff you need to form stars is hydrogen and helium which is absolutely everywhere in the universe. In order for stars to form, however, you need a lot of it. This usually happens if you have a strong gravitational force, which pulls in more and more gas (very very slowly). If the gas cools sufficiently, at some point the gravitational force will overcome the thermal pressure of the gas, causing it to collapse and form stars. This is the basic mechanism of star formation everywhere and it probably isn't much different in this particular system. The strongest gravitational forces are caused by dark matter haloes which are usually larger than the galaxy itself and much heavier. On smaller scales, the main gravitational force is caused by the collapsing gas itself. Both probably still exist in this system and provide the required gravity for stars to form. A note: While dust has an impact on star formation (it might help the gas to cool, for example) it is not a required ingredient for stars to form. In fact, the first stars formed at a time when there was no dust in the universe.
- Maursault 4y ago> Gas in front of it gets shocked because of this supersonic, very high-velocity impact of the black hole moving through the gas. What's the speed of sound in intergalactic space, anyway?
- pyinstallwoes 4y agoHyper liminal I’d say!
- vl 4y agoIt’s interesting that they used “supersonic” since phenomenon of sound emerges when there is enough molecules to collide with each other to transmit sound waves, which is not the case in the outer space. But most probable speed of hydrogen molecules at 2.7K is surprisingly low - 150m/s. This speed can be used as “sound” speed approximation in the intergalactic space.
- Maursault 4y agoThe use of "supersonic" was likely metaphor, but I thought it was funny coming from a scientist, as we expect them to usually speak literally with precise accuracy.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- vrglvrglvrgl 4y ago[dead]
- tempodox 4y ago> "This is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it," van Dokkum added. Like so many of the most interesting discoveries.
- scotty79 4y agoI think we might know very little about free moving black holes just because they are very hard to notice. I suspect they make huge part of dark matter.
- b3lvedere 4y agoJust when i thought the universe couldn't be more weird, it proves me wrong :) I love that. Like some Galactus-like beings is just casually playing pong with black holes just for some fun.
- once_inc 4y agoFor those replying to this article with "imagine living there", please note that if life is a verdant, resilient and common as many of us hope it is, the universe might contain quite a number of insane places to live: - Near the center of a galaxy, where stars are so closely packed together that the night sky is filled with bright lights, perhaps illuminating their world to what we experience around twilight, or even brighter. - Far removed from the center of a galaxy, or even on a rogue star that has escaped its galaxy early on. Very few stars visible in the sky. - Inside a 'thick' nebula, obscuring all other entities in the sky except for their own star and planets. Imagine an interstellar object like Oumuamua passing through and the complete perplexity of a civilization observing it and wondering where it could have come from. - A double planet system. - A system where the planet's orbit is highly elliptic, or where the precession of a tidally locked planet causes day/night cycles.
- lvncelot 4y ago> Inside a 'thick' nebula, obscuring all other entities in the sky except for their own star and planets. Imagine an interstellar object like Oumuamua passing through and the complete perplexity of a civilization observing it and wondering where it could have come from. This is almost the exact premise of Life, the Universe and Everything, the third book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.
- asicsp 4y ago>A double planet system Did you mean a double star system? Or something like Earth-Moon where the size difference between the two bodies is much lesser?
- TheDudeMan 4y agoImagine using the word "supersonic" while talking about black holes.
- mcguire 4y agoAnd when talking about intergalactic gas.
- nirui 4y ago> This intergalactic skyrocket is likely the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. Astronomers suspect the first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago. That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers. They whirled around each other as a binary black hole. > Then another galaxy came along with its own supermassive black hole... One of the black holes robbed momentum from the other two black holes and got thrown out of the host galaxy. I'm obviously not an expert, and this comment is obviously way off the topic, but allow me to wonder: If one supermassive black hole like the our Sagittarius A* can be that dominance, isn't this makes the black hole the most important "asset" of the galaxy? By that, I mean, if you somehow destroyed the back hole (which is what Kurzgesagt was trying to convince people to do, hehe), the galaxy will fall a part, assuming the bulge alone don't have enough gravity to hold the galaxy together. If you let me expand this a little: So if there are advanced alien civilizations in our galaxy, maybe they want to take control of that black hole? Since that location is the only location unique in the entire galaxy. If I can expand this a little further: As we human currently observed it, Sagittarius A* is currently quite stable (???) with no sign of disappearing. Can this suggest that in our galaxy there is not a single civilization advanced enough to (or want to) modify Sagittarius A* in a significant way, or maybe black hole just cannot be influenced easily even for a higher tier civilization (maybe wormhole is too hard too)? I know I missed many details. It's just a shower thought first came out after I docked at a space station few light years away from Sagittarius A* in the game Elite Dangerous. Throwing the idea out there. BTW: If someone is going to write a novel based on this, you need to pay for the idea up front :)
- hutzlibu 4y ago"Can this suggest that in our galaxy there is not a single civilization advanced enough to (or want to) modify Sagittarius A* in a significant way, or maybe black hole just cannot be influenced easily even for a higher tier civilization" It is also possible, that they don't want to modify the black hole, because it is working as intended? Why would we change the sun, even if we could? But apart from that, yes, a civilisation would need to bery very, very advanced to significantly alter a black hole, like the one at the center of our galaxy.
- tehforsch 4y ago
- jzer0cool 4y ago> barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes 14 minutes?
- djaychela 4y agoI thought that, but it's still about a million miles per hour, so not hanging about.
- olddustytrail 4y agoIf you fired a high velocity rifle at the moon and nothing slowed the bullet down (no gravity, air resistance etc), it would hit the moon in about three and a half days.
- wruza 4y ago2x of the Sun going through galaxy, if my math is correct. And 15x of Earth’s orbital speed around the Sun.
- neom 4y ago"...when he was looking through Hubble Space Telescope images and noticed a suspected blemish that looked like a scratch on photographic film" Is it possible for a layperson like myself to spend an evening casually looking through the trove of Hubble images or are they only for astronomers? I googled around but I couldn't find an archive anywhere.
- fnord77 4y agohttps://hla.stsci.edu/ https://hla.stsci.edu/
- jdblair 4y agoactual picture on page 3: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/acba86/pdf https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/acba86/...
- PM_me_your_math 4y agoIs there a picture or do we just have to take their word for it?
- mk_stjames 4y agoThe amount of science that the HST has produced and continues to produce is staggering; however I often comment that I find it a bit sad that most people don't know that we didn't just build 1 of them... we built more than a dozen of them, at a cost that dwarfs the program cost for the HST [0] But only the one with the instruments and mission direction that gives us scientific insight. It feels like such a shame. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN
- nfriedly 4y ago> ...located over halfway across the universe! Does that mean halfway across the known universe, or is it just a figure of speech for "a really long way away"? (Or is my assumption that the universe is infinite wrong?)
- junon 4y agoSince it's been located, it most likely refers to the "observable universe" - the sphere surrounding us (Earth) within which enough time has passed since the big bang that the EMR from the edge has reached Earth. Beyond that we have no idea what's there because that information hasn't travelled long and far enough to each us yet. It's kind of like a physics fog of war.