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Photo: NASA, ESA and J.A. Muñoz (University of Valencia)
You're looking at a picture of a quasar that's beeing sucked into a black hole, taken by the Hubble Space telescope. ESA's Hubble Space Telescope page explains:
While black holes themselves are invisible, the forces they unleash cause some of the brightest phenomena in the Universe. Quasars — short for quasi-stellar objects — are glowing discs of matter that orbit supermassive black holes, heating up and emitting extremely bright radiation as they do so.
“A quasar accretion disc has a typical size of a few light-days, or around 100 billion kilometres across, but they lie billions of light-years away. This means their apparent size when viewed from Earth is so small that we will probably never have a telescope powerful enough to see their structure directly,” explains Jose Muñoz, the lead scientist in this study.
Until now, the minute apparent size of quasars has meant that most of our knowledge of their inner structure has been based on theoretical extrapolations, rather than direct observations.
The team therefore used an innovative method to study the quasar: using the stars in an intervening galaxy as a scanning microscope to probe features in the quasar’s disc that would otherwise be far too small to see. As these stars move across the light from the quasar, gravitational effects amplify the light from different parts of the quasar, giving detailed colour information for a line that crosses through the accretion disc.
All this time, it turns out that we may just be living inside a black hole. Physicist Nikodem Poplawski of Indiana University posited that inside each black hole there could exist another universe:
"Maybe the huge black holes at the centre of the Milky Way and other galaxies are bridges to different universes," Poplawski says. If that is correct – and it’s a big "if" – there is nothing to rule out our universe itself being inside a black hole. [...]
How would we know if we are living inside a black hole? Well, a spinning black hole would have imparted some spin to the space-time inside it, and this should show up as a "preferred direction" in our universe, says Poplawski. Such a preferred direction would result in the violation of a property of space-time called Lorentz symmetry, which links space and time. It has been suggested that such a violation could be responsible for the observed oscillations of neutrinos from one type to another.
My
Vuvuzela Is Bigger Than Yours T-Shirt by Chris
Murphy - $14.95
The 2010 World Cup is almost over (the final match between the Netherlands and Spain this Sunday) and you know what this means: soon there will be no more vuvuzelas.
I know that some of you can't wait for the instrument from hell to go away, but because many of us just can't let go of our newly found fascination, let me present Neatorama's 5 Neat & Quick Facts about the Vuvuzela (we promise it's a whole lot more fun than listening to the farting horn):
Vuvuzelas has something in common with black holes: both emit a single continuous tone of B flat. In 2003, astronomers at NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory detected a peculiar sound that has been rippling through space for 2.5 billion years:
"We have observed the prodigious amounts of light and heat created by black holes," said Andrew Fabian of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, England, and leader of the study. "Now we have detected the sound."
"The Perseus sound waves are much more than just an interesting form of black hole acoustics," said Fabian's colleague Steve Allen. "These sound waves may be the key in figuring out how galaxy clusters grow." (Source)
It's interesting to note that although light cannot escape the incredibly massive black hole, the buzzing sound of vuvuzelas has absolutely no trouble whatsoever.
Meet Freddie "Saddam" Maake, the inventor of the vuvuzela (and apparently, lover of funky hats and silly glasses):
He says the pictures may only show him with a vuvuzela as late as the 1970s, but Maake claims to have made his first horn in 1965. “I started with an old bicycle horn that used to have a black rubber. I removed the rubber and blew it with my mouth.” He pulls the old horn out of his bag to collaborate his story. (Source)
Hyundai devoted an entire engineering unit to create the world's largest weapon of mass annoyance, a 114-foot long vuvuzela in Cape Town, South Africa. From Chris Rawlinson blog:
Hyundai and Jupiter Drawing Room, Cape Town have come up with a fun way to get the upcoming 2010 FIFA World Cup matches underway. They have erected a huge 114-foot-long Vuvuzela on one of the unfinished flyover roads above Cape Town and attached several air horns to the mouth piece, when blown it makes one hell of a noise (see the test video below to see for yourself).
*apparently, "gees" means spirits.
The vuvuzela may be a South African invention, but making them so annoying worldwide can only be done by China:
If you need another reminder of China's manufacturing omnipresence, just turn on your TV for any World Cup match. That incessant drone that sounds like a swarm of bees crossed with elephants? Made in China.
South Africans may have inspired the vuvuzela -- the horn that, when sounded by hundreds of thousands of soccer fans, has irritated people the world over -- but it's the Chinese who can make millions of them for about 30 cents apiece and have them shipped to your shores in weeks.
Industry officials said about 90% of the world's vuvuzelas are produced in two coastal provinces: Guangdong and Zhejiang.
Talk
about turning lemon into lemonade: Austrian goldsmith Klemens Pointner
turned a cheap $3 plastic vuvuzela into $30,000 by covering it in white
gold and encrusting it with diamonds. It was bought by - who else - a
rich Russian businessman:
The goldsmith added: "My client is a Russian oligarch who I met at a trade fair in Moscow. He wanted something truly unique to hand over as a gift to a business partner ahead of the kick-off of the final."
Pointner – who refused to reveal his customer’s identity – said the white gold-clad Vuvuzela also features a one-carat diamond. (Source)
Like Miss Cellania earlier posted, scientists today are celebrating the success of the Large Hadron Collider. CERN scientists were able to collide protons at energy levels never seen before, marking the beginning of a whole new world of physics experimentation. And, again we say, “Yippee No Black Holes.”
There was cheering in the control room at CERN, the European nuclear research centre in Switzerland, as one of the biggest and most complicated scientific experiments got fully underway.
The experiment is seen as a major breakthrough in efforts to understand the fundamental nature of the universe.
Link (At the link you can listen to a BBC interview with Dr Bose from Boston University.)
We just wanted to remind you that you can get your own Large Hadron Collider T-shirt by visiting the online shop.
Researchers Qiang Chen and Tie Jun Cui of Southeast University in Nanjing, China created a device that partially simulates the effects (to a limited scale) of a black hole. It bends light differently from a the way that a black hole does, but it will readily absorb it:
The hole is the latest clever device to use ‘metamaterials’, specially engineered materials that can bend light in unusual ways. Previously, scientists have used such metamaterials to build ‘invisibility carpets’ and super-clear lenses.[...]
The new meta-black hole also bends light, but in a very different way. Rather than relying on gravity, the black hole uses a series of metallic ‘resonators’ arranged in 60 concentric circles. The resonators affect the electric and magnetic fields of a passing light wave, causing it to bend towards the centre of the hole. It spirals closer and closer to the black hole’s ‘core’ until it reaches the 20 innermost layers. Those layers are made of another set of resonators that convert light into heat. The result: what goes in cannot come out. “The light into the core is totally absorbed,” Cui says.
Link via Popular Science | Image: NASA
Scientists have detected a black hole 12.8 billion light-years away, which means it was around when the universe was very young. This one is a billion times the size of our sun! The light from the black hole (or more correctly, from burning objects being sucked into it) has traveled so long to get to earth that its wavelengths have shifted. The process, known as redshift, help astronomers to calculate the huge distance to objects in space.
To see the supermassive black hole, the team of scientists used new red-sensitive charge-coupled devices (CCDs) installed in the Suprime-Cam camera on the Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea.
CCDs are used in many light detecting gadgets from photocopiers to bar-code readers. In astronomy they are used to collect analogue information (such as light or an electrical charge from a distant object) and convert it into digital information that can be analyzed by computer software.
(image credit: University of Hawaii)
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Black Hole Destroying a Star Watch this amazing simulation: Link |
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Serenity Bar Fight Rehearsal |
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Peeing While Walking A comment on VideoSift by Pprt: "When urine a rush ..." Link (SFW, don't worry - you can't see nothin') |
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Star, the Smart Dog Here's a 5 min-long clip of the smartest puppy on the planet: Link |
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Ice Skating Polar Bear |
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