Posted on 04/14/2009 10:37:20 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
A jet of gas spewing from a huge black hole has mysteriously brightened, flaring to 90 times its normal glow.
For seven years the Hubble Space Telescope has been watching the jet, which pours out of the supermassive black hole in the center of the M87 galaxy. It has photographed the strange phenomenon fading and then brightening, with a peak that even outshines M87's brilliant core.
Scientists have dubbed the enigmatic bright blob HST-1, and are so far at a loss to explain its weird behavior.
"I did not expect the jet in M87 or any other jet powered by accretion onto a black hole to increase in brightness in the way that this jet does," said astronomer Juan Madrid of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who conducted the Hubble study. "It grew 90 times brighter than normal. But the question is, does this happen to every single jet or active nucleus, or are we seeing some odd behavior from M87?"
Many supermassive black holes have jets of material that spray out perpendicularly from the donut-shaped ring of matter falling onto the black hole. These beams of hot gas are thought to result from magnetic field lines that are twisted by the black hole's mass, and propel charged particles outward.
But most rays do not appear to blaze up with such extreme intensity as HST-1. Scientists aren't sure if it is an exceptional case, or if it represents a normal event for black hole jets, which are still not very well understood. In this case, the bright knot of HST-1 is about 214 light-years from the M87 galaxy's core
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
In these Hubble photos, the core of M87 is located at lower left in the images. HST-1 is the bright blob at center. The glowing material at far right is part of a stream of particles in the jet that speed up and glow in the ultraviolet. The photos show show the jet growing brighter over a seven-year period. Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Madrid (McMaster University)
Astronomy sometimes depresses me, because I know that before the ultra-light speed travel or teleportation or beaming or whatever the hell it is gets developed so that we can actually travel to some of these fascinating places in this galaxy, I’ll have long ago passed through the intestinal tract of the local worm population.
I’m so happy to be living in such a wonderful period when so much is known and yet so much remains a mystery. We live in the best of times.
“The Universe has been brought to you by Bridgestone”.
My kids crack up every time they hear that.
Frankly I’m sick of blacks holes.
Oops! Make that black holes. LOL.
Yeah, they suck.
[picture of the guy posing in front of the drilling platform gas burn-off valve in 5...4...3...]
The Universe is roughly 14 Billion years. According to the end-theory you believe in it may last another trillion years or exist into infinity. Your lifespan is roughly 75 years if you’re lucky. Your existence is less than a milli-microsecond in all of time. So exactly why are we here now in this universe? Why doesn’t the Universe have a shorter life-span? Why don’t we have a longer life-span, or live forever? What’s the point? Obviously humans will not exist on this planet indefinitely. Another 500 years? 5,000 years? 500,000 years? Highly doubtful. Highly doubtful we will live extraterrestrial. The Universe is so vast, so hostile. Why? You can discover every principle of science and every Law, but unless you can uncover the ‘reason’ we exist, and why we exist now, and the actual purpose of our existence, then we have learned nothing.
Galaxies, like a group of animals, reveal at a glance all stages of birth, growth and maturity. Take one example. M87 is a famous galaxy near the center of our Local Super Cluster. In 1918, even before the recognition of galaxies, it was observed with a small telescope to have a blue spike coming out of its center5. With the most expensive modern day telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope, Fig. 1 shows this spike contains a number of small, compact objects. These objects are radiating a continuous spectrum of synchrotron (charged particle) radiation. The conventional view is that they are clouds of hot gas ejected from the nucleus with about the speed of light (observed from displacement over time).
But how do you accelerate a cloud of hot gas to velocity near c? How do you get a hold of it? And why does it not just go POOF and dissipate? Even more revealing, one sees these objects grow in size and luminosity as they move outward along the jet. What do we see further out along the jet? For one, a radio, X-ray galaxy (M 84) with swept back X-ray isophotes indicating travel out along the jet. It is closely accompanied by a high redshift (z ~ 1) quasar. Further out is a very bright radio, X-ray quasar with flanking quasars around z = 1. This is all set in an extended line of X-ray sources and older, more evolved galaxies 5.
So we have spread out before us a more or less complete empirical demonstration of how galaxies are born and evolve. As the variable mass theory requires, the emergence of new matter near m = 0 requires speeds of pure energy near c. As the particle masses grow they slow down in order to conserve momentum in the extragalactic rest frame. That means the elementary particles cool. Together with the increasing gravity the growing matter condenses into a proto quasar/galaxy. (No dark matter needed!) When atoms form they at first radiate weak, high redshifted photons. The redshift then decreases with time as it evolves into a more normal galaxy. The variable mass theory requires the younger galaxies to have intrinsic redshifts which diminish as they evolve.
M87 is just one example but there are now dozens of galaxy/quasar/redshift observations which tell the same story6. The cry that has always gone up is that there is no viable theory to explain the redshift anomalies. But more than 20 years ago I left my office at Santa Barbara St. and went down to campus to ask Dick Feynman his opinion. After a considerable talk, not all of which I understood, he summed up by saying: The Hoyle-Narlikar theory is a complete theory and is not contradicted in any respect. But we do not need it because our present theory explains everything. There is always the chance he was putting me on a bit but I feel strongly that [if] he could see the evidence today he would say we need it.
Not true. Learning how something was made gives us incite into who made it.
That seems a bit harsh. We have learned a lot in a relatively short period of time, but much is left to discover. Arguing Descartes' point and stretching it to say we have learned nothing makes no sense to me, especially in light of all that we have learned. Whether we exist because of some hiccup of nature or were placed here by a higher being is moot. The fact remains we are here and we should learn what we can in the short time we do exist.
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Why doesn’t the Universe have a shorter life-span? Why don’t we have a longer life-span, or live forever? And you're assuming you don't exist forever? Still looking at only the physical spacetime manifestations around you and not looking with the spiritual eye? 'What IS the Universe' may be far more than you have discerned at this primitive time in the history of the Universe. And that may be the point of you being alive in a body now, before the greater Universe is yet to be discerned and observed using the power of the sceintific method. Spiritual Faith is a really tough sell if there are no unanswered great questions. Faith may be a force or dimension of extreme importance that you learn to express now while it cannot get others into more danger than it does. When you use faith to sit upon a chair, you endanger no one else in the room usually if the chair fails to hold you. If you express faith that God is and is a rewarder of those who dilligently seek Him, you harm no one and may actually develop your yet to be vital 'faith force'.
What’s the point? Obviously humans will not exist on this planet indefinitely. Another 500 years? 5,000 years? 500,000 years? If you are not a spiritual being in a physical body, what difference does it make, you were and then you are not. BUT, if you are a spiritual being in a short-lived physical body, you will be 'graduating' to the next stage of your existence more quickly than say a being who spends five or six hundred years in the physical body. The time scales of these stages are up to the Creator's plan, if you believe you are a spirit in a body now.
"What's the point?" Sad, to ask that when you could ask, 'what has God in Mind with this arrangement?' If there is no God, you lose nothing in taking the 'hope' approach, whereas the 'what's the point' removes not only hope but purpose, unnecessarily.
Oh, and BTW, it may well be that this relatively calm period is the only period during which your ‘primitive’ life could come to be in the lifetime of the dynamic Universe. If it has taken four billion years to make you, and the Universe you have this physical body in has been around for fifteen billion years, the window of your coming into existence may be closing, and a more restrictive less hospitable Universe may be approaching.
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