How to See a Black-hole With a Small Telescope

Blackholes are one of the most mysterious and powerful objects in the universe. Plus, due to their nature, all but invisible.

Scientists traditionally have used x-ray or gamma ray telescopes in hopes of locating new singularities.

Unfortunately these installations are large and expensive, well outside the capabilities of the back yard astronomer.

Now, according the the original Gizmodo article, a new study suggests that we could accomplish the same thing with

nothing more than a standard, optical 8-inch telescope.

This hat trick is accomplished by one of the most common black hole - an X-Ray binary consisting of a massive dead star that proceeds to absorb all the material in it's vicinity.   This leads to the emission of huge amounts of X-Rays, but a new discovery shows that the X-Ray binary also emits a small amount of low - level light, but well within the capabilities of a modest backyard telescope.

Using data from a nearby black hole (V404 Cygni which had a recent flickering event) the black hole was show to emit low-energy photons which makes the singularity "flicker" and visible to even modest telescopes.

Video  of  V404 Cygni flickering

Complete Gizmodo article

Black Holes Aren’t One-way Street

 

Black holes, in the not so distant past, used to be simple.

Time was, using the rules of general relativity, you could imagine a fairly simple black hole consisting of an infinitely-dense singularity surrounded by a gravitational zone of no-escape called the “event horizon”. Even the speed of light was no match for the event horizon, hence the "black" in black hole.  Whatever goes in, never comes out.

This rather simple description was a fairly decent description of what was going on inside a black hole. But in the 1970′s, the inconsistencies began to trouble the likes of British theoretical physics scientist Stephen Hawking who theorized evaporating black holes, which went a long ways to clearing up some of the more troubling inconsistencies.

Now, as an extension to his original theory, Hawking thinks that black holes aren’t the one-way street the textbooks have led us to believe.

 

There is much more info at the discovery site.  Read the Discovery article HERE

Monsters of the Cosmos - Symphony of Science

Here is the newest offering from Symphony of Science!

This time out the target is Black Holes and SoS is up to the task. There are cuts of Morgan Freeman,
Neil deGrasse Tyson among others. 

Maybe not their best effort, but none to shabby either.

Take a listen....

Mystery Signal From the Past

Astronomers using the 210 foot CSIRO Parks radio telescope located in Australia have detected a radio source from 10 billion light years away!

The drama, though, started in 2007 when astronomers were studying a whole sky survey from 2001.  What immediately stood out was an incredibly powerful and extremely short, about 5 millisecond, a curiously short duration, one that was never again, until seven years to the day.

As odd as this sounds, there's more.  The first time it was recorded, the burst was so short it was somewhat doubtful that it had really happened at all.  So when the bursts started again after more than half a decade, astronomers were anxious to study the data.  However their results didn't seem to make sense.  

First, the events seem to come from an unbelievable distance, well outside the Milkyway.  Being as bright as the events were, and the distance involved, they had to be something cataclysmic.  Something along the line of  neutron stars merging or black holes, a dying magnetar, or a black hole feasting on a star, the bursts coming from huge amounts of stellar material dropping through the event horizon.  One thing is clear however.  These bursts came from so far away that when they started the universe was only half as old as it's present age, or 6 to 9 billion years old.

The implications are numerous but it may be very likely that they shed some light on the Universe's missing matter.

One thing however seems to be apparent, the initial "quiet" time between bursts.  It seems that bursts like these should be happening every 10 seconds if the sky could be observed completely by large radio telescopes.

Article in Space Reporter

Andromeda is FULL of Black Holes!

And ones more from my little motorcycle dude..

Discovery.com website writes about a section of the Andromeda galaxy that has recently been under the scrutiny of NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope.

From the article:

• 26 new stellar-mass black hole candidates have been identified, adding to nine previously known and bringing the grand total to 35.

 The photo shows the core of Andromeda's X-Ray candidates and the core.

Check out the complete Discovery article here

BMU # 361 Now Online Kahn & Khaw

After a short intro, I spend about ten minutes in my opening with a discussion. This week, why I feel the force you call gravity does not exist in the classical sense. At least according to the first law of motion...and some of the second. YOu can write comments to me btw at beammeuppodcast@gmail.com or go to the blog at wrfrbeamEup.blogspot.com and make your thoughts known on the weekly show description.

 From there....

 Episode 19 of Jason Kahn's series In Plain Sight. This week, psychic detective Jack Garrett has become interested in a mysterious back room, but to gain entrance he must face a man why himself also fairly crackles with psychic energy. Jack it would seem has his "work" cut out for him.

 The Original Star Trek (tost) is next in line as I find interesting Star Trek trivia from my favorite Star Trek trivia book. Some interesting facts to be had, to be sure.

 Next Earth_Sky reports on the Lyrid April 16-26 2013

 Kallamus is back with his weekly rundown, starts with a returning DBZ. NASA has submitted its' 2013 budget, one really exciting news about an asteroid capture, tow and then explore! First ever discovery of a black hole chowing down on a rogue planet! Io has some wildly different volcanic activity! Kallamus finds a site that shows how the planets would appear if they were in the same place as our moon. It is a stunning effect! Kall found some really good info on the "Man of Steel" movie. And finally Kall has a run at conspiracy when they take aim at a clothing tester and that somehow has been twisted into terminators of all things!

 Finally I read Having Survived an Apocalypse by Mini Khaw a story I read for the online flash fiction site Antipodean.

 All in all, I think this week's program was great fun. I hope you think so too!

Don't Look Now, But We Have 2k Rogue Black Holes Tailing Us!

Does the thought of this kinda give you nightmares?  It should...you know that horrid old gag they still pull in scary movies?  You know, when someone calls on the phone to say the killer is right there in the house!  Well we may have 2 thousand of the worst type of  dealers of death practicably in the same room with us! And are we talking about your average singularity?  nope Galaxy class Black Holes.

How is this possible?  Haven't we been told that when a galaxy starts to form, its the central black hole that is powering the growth, right?  Well yeah, up to a point.  But when galaxies merge, the complex gravitational dance that can eject one of the massive central black holes.

Implausible as that sounds, astronomers have found evidence that in the space just outside the Milky-way of thousands of orphan black holes.


IO9 article

 Credit: Aurore Simonnet/Sonoma State University/NASA.

Star Orbits Black Hole At the Astounding Speed of 1.2 Million mph

I sure am a sucker for these articles about high speed stars and black holes.  To that effect, here is a link to an article in Bad Astronomy.   A star system has been found in which a star is orbiting its' companion at 1.2 million mph!  The star orbits its' companion every 2.4 hours.  Let put this in perspective,  the star has an orbital radius of about 600000 miles, that's about twice the distance from the Earth to the Moon.  

doozy!  Courtney sent me this

Now if everything else remains even, if the moon were at the distance from the Earth that the star is from its black hole, it would take the Moon 56 days to do the same orbit that this insane star system does in just under 2 1/2 hours!   It clearly gives you an indication of how insane the forces are even well outside the event horizon.    Thankfully it is not the norm but is instead a record setter system.  

The black-hole/star system is very difficult to observe.  Right now astronomers put it about 1000 LY away but could easily be 20X further away.  

The system named MAXI J1659−152 was discovered in 2010 simultaneously by NASA’s Swift and the Japanese MAXI satellites.  

The rest of the article is equally informative.  You can find the rest here.

Nebula May be an Indicator of Galaxy's Newest Black Hole

W49B, shown in this photo is the remnants of the end of a super-massive star's life.  This super-nova took place about 26,000 LY away, as seen from Earth the explosion took place, according to the Wired article, the object is only about 1000 years old. 

(Ok, other than 1000 years old and possibly one of the youngest in the galaxy, something about that statement caught me strange. the Wired article  was worded just as I entered it.  2600 lys away and a 1000 years old.  Do you see yet what has me going....ahhhhh what???  Let me explain...and where does my logic fall down?  Light travels at light speed, for the most part right?  When the super-nova blew, light traveled from it to us.  Said star is 26000 LY, we are not  interested so much in distance but in time 26,000 years time to be exact.  So how can something that blew 26,000 years ago be anything but 26,000 years old? )

Oddities in age not withstanding, W49B is still an odd creature.  Looking at it's shape it is evident that the collapse and release of matter was not uniform.  You can see from the picture that instead of a uniform globe, the super-nova left huge spikes at what may have been it's poles.  

Also, data gathered from the Chandra X-Ray telescope:

• only half of it showed concentrations of iron while sulfur and silicon were spread evenly throughout. This type of explosion, known as a bipolar supernova, has never been seen before in the galaxy.

Chandra can also look "inside" of the nebula cloud:

• Intermediate-mass stars will give rise to neutron stars — heavy, compact objects that emit copious amounts of X-rays or radio pulses.  Since these signals are not present, scientists suggest that the star was massive enough to continue the collapse all the way to a black hole.

Read the complete Wired article here

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A Black Hole How Big?!

Astronomers have discovered the largest black hole on record.  Located in the center of the NGC 1277 galaxy about 220 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus, lays a monster 17 billion times the mass of our sun with an event horizon ten times the size of our solar system!  By comparison, the Milky Way's center singularity is about four million solar masses.

Most super massive black holes at the center of galaxies make up roughly .1 percent of their host galaxy mass.  But NGC 1277 accounts for a staggering 14% of it host's mass!  Now that one ultra massive black hole has been uncovered, it would seem they are not as uncommon as previously thought.  The astronomy team at the Planck Institute for Astronomy have found five more galaxies with similar characteristics.  Plus they may have discovered (confirmation is still pending) a black hole that could be as large as 30 billion solar masses eight months ago.

One thing is really clear with the discovery however.  The discovery of these ultra-massive black holes will have to lead to a rethink of the dynamics behind the formation of galaxies.

Thanks to Dan for the heads up.

complete Register article

Black Hole Observed Destroying Star

A team of astronomers at John Hopkins University have witnessed an event that is believed to only happen once every ten thousand years. A super-massive black hole destroying and absorbing an orbiting star.

The super massive black-hole in question resides in the center of a galaxy 2.7 billion light-years distant from the Milkyway. The John Hopkins team of astronomers led by Dr Suvi Gerzari was looking for ultraviolet light from the center of a galaxy, which is often a clue that a black hole has recently absorbed a star at some point in the past. Much to their surprise the team noticed a bright glare coming from the center of a distant galaxy. This bright light is an indication that a black hole is in the process of consuming a star in close orbit around it. This happens so infrequently that the astronomers have been looking for years to observe the phenomenon.


was looking for a bright flare in ultraviolet light from the nucleus of a galaxy, which is a lingering clue that a black hole has consumed a star. Instead, they discovered an active black hole in the process of consuming a star.

Read complete Australian Geographic article here

Thanks to Dan for the heads up on this article

As of Now - Astronomers Have No Idea What Causes Cosmic Rays

Up until a short while ago, astronomers were confident they had a handle on where cosmic rays come from.

Cosmic Rays generate ultra-powerful particles. So powerful in fact that nothing on Earth or anywhere in the Universe can generate anything close let alone as powerful as cosmic ray particles.

 Scientists thought thought that cosmic rays were created in powerful gamma-ray bursts - but more resent experimental results have proved this idea to be false.

 Data from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory - located in Antarctica - has been searching for the illusive neutrino but has failed to observe a single occurrence - despite monitoring hundreds of gamma-ray bursts.

Now this presents itself as a fairly disturbing result. The neutrino has long been considered a part of the cosmic ray along with many other particles. So if you wanted to find where a cosmic ray originated you only had to look in the direction that the particle came from. We have detected cosmic rays for quite some time, but no neutrino - making finding the source of cosmic rays impossible!

 To say the least, scientists are "disappointed" in this result. However, now that they have discovered that cosmic rays are a non starter, another source needs to be found. The only other source that is energetic enough to generate neutrinos is the super massive black holes at the center of every galaxy including the Milky Way. Scientists do not know as of yet if these black-holes are capable or do emit neutrinos. The mystery really is heating up. Check out neutrinos at the Wiki site here

Were There Black Holes Before the Big Bang?

I have long held the opinion that space and time are flip sides of the same coin space/ and time are both held in equilibrium by the density of mass or mass/density. They are all facets of the same thing. Mass curves space. All of the mass, curves all the space back on to itself, meaning all the space encompasses all the mass. This structure then has to include all of time as "space/time". But more importantly the higher the mass density, the slower the time passes - with the inverse also true.

So what the hell am I getting at? Well the way I understand space/time/mass is that there can not be anything "outside" or "before" because all the mass contains all the space/time. In other works there is no "space" and no "time" outside the curve of space time because all the mass has curved it back onto itself. A mobius of space / time if you will.

So when cosmologists from Canada's Dalhousie University and Queen Mary University in London, theorized that some primordial black holes might have existed before the big bang, having been created in the Big Crunch. Which puts the Universe on a cyclic time line. Meaning that the Big Bang was not a single event, but one that occurs over and over again as the Universe crunches down to a single point, then expands again.

Well this is rather inconvenient. I grew up thinking that the universe was either expanding or contracting and would do so forever. Then the dark time when the Universe showed an ever increasing expansion that would continue forever slowly cooling and darking the Universe leaving a dark emptiness.

Now it would seem that a expansion/compression Universe in a possibility again. And more, that structures can exist outside of the big crunch / bang. (my head hurts)

Now cosmologists theorize that black holes of a certain mass could avoid the crush of the big crunch and survive as separate entities. The masses of these black holes would have to be small, with the upper limit being equal to the mass of our sun.

From the article:

• The theory is based on  the Earth, and the rest of the known Universe occasionally (being) bombarded with unexplained bursts of gamma rays -- something that could, (possibly) be the result of primordial black holes running out of energy and disintegrating.  (some scientists are calling this effect evaporation of the singularity, which should result in massive bursts of gamma radiation.  ed)

The "primordial" black holes are fundamentally different from black holes that were created later.  Regular black holes today are created by the collapse / supernova of super-massive stars.   The primordial black holes were possibly created by the crunch of the universe.   One problem is that post big bang also created primordial black holes.  

From the article:

• A key problem they agree on is that it would likely be impossible to tell the difference between pre- and post Big Bang primordial black holes.

Daily Galaxy article here

Evaporating Black Holes Hint At Gravity May Not Be A Fundamental Force

This article in the Daily Galaxy  hints at some really troubling ideas.  Since 2011 researchers at the University of York  have been doing research on black holes that changes fundamentally how we view the "permanence" of a singularity.

Up to this point it has universally accepted that anything that crossed the "event horizon" of a black hole  can never crawl back across and escape.  This even in light of Dr. Hawkings modifying his position slightly  on the total loss of information.

However the York researchers study suggests that information can and does escape leads them to suggest that gravity alone may NOT be an all encompassing fundamental force but

• "that space, time and even gravity itself may be emergent properties within a deeper theory," said Samuel Braunstein.  

As you might guess, many physicists  are skeptical that quantum mechanic which is primarily used to describe light and sub-atomic particles can be applied to fundamental forces of nature as it operates in a black hole.  Many feel that it's hard to properly describe the evaporating black hole without the effects of gravity on the system.

From the Article:

• "We cannot claim to have proven that escape from a black hole is truly possible, but that is the most straight-forward interpretation of our results,"  said Samuel Braunstein

read the complete Daily Galaxy article here

Are There Trillions and Trillians of Comets & Asteroids Around the Milkyway's Giant Black Hole?

Just about every day, the black hole at the center of our Milkyway Galaxy flairs uo with a burst of gamma as well as X-ray radios. This here to fore undiscovered phenomena was discovered by the Cnandra space telescope operated by NASA and documented over several years.

Not all the x-ray radiation need come from material falling  through the black hole's event horizon.  Any object that passes withing 100 million miles of  the super massive singularity would instantly be torn apart.  Then it would be torn apart by the gravitational forces. Then the material would then be vaporized by friction bye  the hot, thin gases that are falling into the black hole giant. 

From the article 
Very long observations ...will be made with Chandra later in 2012 that will give valuable new information about the frequency and brightness of flares and should help to test the model proposed here to explain them.

Black Holes observed ejecting High Speed "Bullets" of Ionized Material

Science Daily blog reports some strange behavior from a group of black holes. Using a variety of satellites astronomers has identified the moment when a black hole in our galaxy launched super-fast knots of gas into space. And the speeds are truly phenomenal as well, approaching 25% C!  These packets seem to originate just outside the event horizon and seem to signal the start of a new accretion process.  

As the accretion events ramp up, infalling matter speeds up and heats up to a point where it begins to emit x-rays.   Physics shows that as this material crosses the event horizon, a portion is redirected to huge jets from each of the poles of the singularity.  This process is at times a bit untidy and instead of evenly flowing ionized particles, huge globules are ejected all at once at extremely high speeds.

The rest of this article is fascinating.  You can read it all here in the Science Daily blog

Smallest Black Hole Discovered

It has indeed been a productive month for black holes. Record setting absolutely huge black holes as big as our solar system has set the record for the largest super massive black hole.

But NASA has discovered a black hole that sets a record for another reason. Being one of the smallest ever discovered. Object IGR J17091-3624 is very very small. In fact, it's probably only three times as massive as the Sun! Dangerously close to the lower limit that could for a black hole at all! Any less massive and it would have stopped collapsing well short of becoming a black hole all together.

More information is available on NASA's site.  

Milky Way's Central Super Massive Black Hole Will Soon Start Feeding Again

I had been hearing rumors of this, but this has to be one of the first times I have seen it in black and white saying this IS going to happen.

What am I blathering on about? Well over at Sagittarius A, better known as the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, things are quite literally heating up. It seems a huge cloud of gas is about to be drawn past the event horizon and down the infinite gravity hole that is the singularity.

Why is this important you say? Black holes by their very nature, swallow things up all the time! Aye but there be the rub....Sagittarius A has been very very quiet for a very very long time. Present day astro scientists for that matter have never directly seen any activity from that area, going instead on the movement of speeding stars around an area hardly larger than the orbital area of Uranus.

Astronomers of late however have detected brightening in the area where Sagittarius A resides, indicating that matter is being heated to millions of degrees.

From the Berkley site:
By 2013, scientists should see outbursts of X-rays and radio waves as the cloud – composed mostly hydrogen and helium gas – gets hotter and is torn asunder. The light emitted around the black hole could increase by a hundredfold to a thousandfold


Graphic: Images taken between 2002 and 2011 by ESO’s Very Large Telescope show the gas cloud falling toward the Milky Way’s central, supermassive black hole. Courtesy of ESO/MPE.

Huge "Black Holes" discovered

I know -screaming about this or that black hole gets old after a while even though these monsters are one of the weirdest constructs in the universe. So when I start saying, this is really scary....either I am buying into my own hype or there is something truly unusual out there. As much as we would like to acknowledge the former it is the latter that has reared its head.

What am I babbling about? A black hole or holes of truly frightening dimensions. First off I really have got to take issue with a black hole having anything resembling dimensions of anything! We are talking about a mass compressed down to an infinitely small area. In truth we are talking about an area of influence or the universal breaking point, the speed of light. The event horizon. So follow that thought both ways and you get an idea why these singularities are so bizarre.

So when:

• Astronomers .. discover the most gigantic black holes ever found in the universe, an abyss 10 times the size of our solar system, encompassing regions or "event horizons" about five times the distance from the sun to Pluto
  

Yep, black holes thousands of times larger than the black holes at the center of the Milky Way with the biggest weighing in at 21 billion Suns!

Check out the Daily Galaxy article here

SM Black Holes Are Spinning Faster Then Ever Before

An article on the Daily Galaxy blog, reports that the spin of super massive black holes is faster than it has ever been in the history of the universe.

First off, you have to admit like I did that this stuff about rotational dynamics of a Kerr or Kerr-Neuman singularity and the loss of angular velocity through energy conversion at the ergosphere/event horizon interface really does make my brain go tilt. Because here is one group that say that the spin collected from the parent star as it collapsed was transferred to the black hole and can be measured at the event horizon (wait, don't call me in it yet). But that spin should be bled off by the ergosphere much like applying disk breaks in a car. Ok, I'll buy that. But then we have to be honest with ourselves when we say black hole and really mean the event horizon. Because the event horizon is in some respect arbitrary in a relative kind of way, because there really isn't anything AT the event horizon. So being honest we are saying that "nothing" can have spin. (no I am not being flip, I know this "nothing" would kill me before I got within a handful of light years from it.)

Ok so this spin is being siphoned off, but in reality will never reach zero. But before that limit is reached where no more energy can be extracted, the black hole converts from a Kerr / Neuman black hole to a Schwarzschild black hole.

Ok so far? So now two UK astronomers have found that the supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies are on average spinning faster! (HUH? Oh come ON! ) Yep, faster than they ever have in the past 13 odd billion years of the universe's existence. DR. Martinez-Sansigre and Prof. Rawlings say that black holes had very low spins at first (That leaves out the star's rotational energy unless that is what they consider slow...) and adding mass from the accretion disk wouldn't add either. But merging super massive black holes would add significantly to their spin.

Hummmm ok, so Martinez-Sansigre and Rawlings say that they are spinning up, where as papers like this wikipedia article for all intents is saying the more the mass the harder the breaks are applied.

Check them both out and let me know what you people think.