Scientists Spy Cosmic Waves Around Black Hole

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - Black holes may actually drag the fabric of space and time around them as they spin, creating waves for cosmic material to surf on, astronomers said on Monday.

This is new evidence that some black holes spin, even as they pull in everything around them, including light. Additional research shows that black holes can twirl material at tremendous speed, as fast as 20,000 miles per second.

"Gas whipping around the black hole has no choice but to ride that wave," Jon Miller of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said. "Albert Einstein predicted this over 80 years ago, and now we are starting to see evidence for it."

Because black holes draw in everything, even light, they themselves are invisible. But astronomers have long studied what happens just outside the black hole, and have found what they call an accretion disk -- a round pancake of material, often made up of material sucked from a nearby star that acts as a black hole's companion and food source.

One characteristic that astronomers watch at the mouth of black holes is the flickering of X-ray light. It would make sense that the flickers would come very fast, since black holes spin so rapidly.

It was more puzzling when the flickering X-rays came more slowly, at as little as one 100th the speed of the fast flickers, Miller told reporters at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Miller and his colleagues theorize that in one black hole system they studied, the slower flickering could be the frequency of a space-time warp. In that case, the flickers -- known as quasi-periodic oscillations -- could be caused by the fabric of space itself churning around the black hole in a wave.

Another team of researchers studying a different black hole detected three sun-sized blobs of gas whirling around in the hole's accretion disk.

By looking at iron atoms, which are good markers for what is occurring around a black hole, the scientists figured that these blobs made one complete trip around the black hole in a day, at speeds up to 20,000 miles per second.

Since these blobs were about as far from the black hole as Jupiter is from the sun, this was remarkable, said Jane Turner of NASA (news - web sites)'s Goddard Space Flight Center. It takes Jupiter 12 years to go around the sun.

The whole system that includes the black hole is relatively tiny, about the size of our solar system, Turner said.

More information and images of a black hole's cosmic wave are available online at

Images

One of the newly anointed largest stars compared to the orbits of planets in our solar system.

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SAN DIEGO -- The previous record holder for largest known star has been bumped into fourth place.

In a survey of 74 known supergiant stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, three have emerged as larger than any others so far measured. Each of the new chart toppers is about 1,500 times the diameter of our Sun, or roughly 7 times bigger than the Earth's solar orbit.

If Jupiter tried to exist in its same orbit around any of these newly measured supergiants, it would be vaporized.

The finding was announced here today at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

These are not abnormal stars. Rather, they're bloated senior citizens suffering a fate similar to that forecast for our Sun. However, the Sun, now middle-aged, has never been and never will be as massive as the supergiants, and so it will only achieve red giant status at about 100 times the diameter it is today. Even that will be bad news for Earth in a few billion years.

The newly crowned largest stars, already known to astronomers as KW Sagitarri, V354 Cephei and KY Cygni, are all in our Milky Way galaxy and within 10,000 light-years of the Sun. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).

They barely beat out the star that was bumped from first to fourth, known popularly as Herschel's Garnet Star.

More significant than finding record setters, astronomers were also able to make more accurate measurements of each stars' temperature -- about 10 percent warmer than thought -- and the combined observations lay to rest a longstanding discrepancy with theory.

"For the first time in many decades there is good agreement between the theory of how large and cool these stars should be, and how large and cool we actually observe them to be," explained Philip Massey, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory who led the work.

Despite their tremendous diameters, the stars are not the most massive in the universe, said MIT undergraduate student Emily Levesque, who presented the findings. At just 25 solar masses, these red supergiants would look like wimps in a weigh-in against stars that can be up to150 times the mass of the Sun.

The most well-known red supergiant is Betelgeuse, which is about 650 times the diameter of the Sun and, owing in part to its proximity, is the 10th brightest star in our night sky.

"...Miller and his colleagues theorize that in one black hole system they studied, the slower flickering could be the frequency of a space-time warp. In that case, the flickers -- known as quasi-periodic oscillations -- could be caused by the fabric of space itself churning around the black hole in a wave."

Or it could mean that a black hole is not a black hole but a black orb, since mass is accelerating inwards, on all sides, towards the center of the sigularity. Additionally, the accretion 'disk' could be an accreation 'cloud' around the black orb and the flickers are unequal excited plasma emissions due to varience in the three dementional cloud. Also, in this reference point of incredible gravity, the possibliity of more than four demensions can be predicted. In a spinning black orb, the gravity is so great at the core that time stops. It stops in this particular time frame, although it continues to go operate normally in other lower gravity loci (Norms Revenge, I guess).

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