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| Black holes deform space and time |
| 2005-01-11 |
| SAN DIEGO, California (AFP) - Black holes, the universe's biggest vacuum cleaners, deform space and time surrounding them, two teams of astrophysicists reported on the sidelines of the American Astronomica Society's winter meeting. Great wahrks! John Miller, of Harvard University's astrophisical center at Boston, Massachusetts, was able to see gas particles literally "surfing" a space-time wave around a black hole known as GRS 1915+105, some 40,000 light years away in the Aquila constellation. "Space surfin' with the stars
" His observations have confirmed a key theory that nothing is able to escape a black hole's extreme gravitational field, not even light waves, Miller told reporters on Tuesday. That's nothing. DU and Indymedia use similar phenomena to keep facts OUT. The data shows that "black holes are such extreme objects that they can actually warp and drag the fabric of spacetime around with them as they spin," the scientists reported. "You're coming with me, you little piece of spacetime!" "Gas whipping around the black hole has no choice but to ride that wave of choppy spacetime sea that distorts everything falling into the black hole," they added. Kind of like how See BS distorts facts before destroying them. The space-time warp caused by extreme gravity was predicted in 1916 by Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity, said Miller, who did his reasearch with Jeroen Homan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They made their observations with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Rossi-X Timing Explorer satellite, the most powerful orbiting X-ray telescope. A second team of astrophysicists headed by Jane Turner working jointly with NASA's Goddard space-flight center and the astrophysical center of the University of Maryland was also able to see three extremely hot sets of particles the size of our Sun turn around a black hole at 32,000 kilometers (20,000 miles) per second -- more than 10 percent the speed of light. In their observations, made with the XMM-Newton satellite of the European Space Agency, scientists were able to see for the first time a particle of matter spinning completely around a black hole. The information should provide vital clues on mass and other characteristics of a black hole, Turner and her colleague Lance Miller of Britain's Oxford University said. The small, but very black hole Turner and Miller trained their instrument on lies in the Makarian galaxy, some 170 million light years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. |
| Posted by:Steve from Relto |
| #8 "used to be", which is why Calcutta is no longer stuck in the 7th century. |
| Posted by: Dishman 2005-01-11 7:06:33 PM |
| #7 Didn't there used to be one of these things in Calcutta? |
| Posted by: Dave D. 2005-01-11 6:22:04 PM |
| #6 To be more precise, gravity distorts spacetime, and black holes are massive gravity sources. Also, they lead to really squishy sandwiches, or is it alternate unverses(universi?). |
| Posted by: mojo 2005-01-11 6:17:16 PM |
| #5 Well if Black Holes distort space-time I guess that gives a rational explanation why the Muddle East is still in the 7th century |
| Posted by: Cheaderhead 2005-01-11 5:55:56 PM |
| #4 there no sucher thing as time, there is only changing probabilities. trust me on this. kitter cat that jumps after a butterfly, is a different cat when it lands. it's all in the triangles you see |
| Posted by: half 2005-01-11 5:53:09 PM |
| #3 It appears there's a nomenclature problem here. For physicists, "space-time" is a single concept. Time still only flows in one direction, and causality is preserved. In an accelerated frame (orbiting a blackhole, standing on a planet, etc), non-accelerated time seems to pass more quickly. Your time traveller might look like a statue... or more likely a slowly dissipating cloud. |
| Posted by: Dishman 2005-01-11 4:35:46 PM |
| #2 Isn't there a glaring error here? If the stuff in the space-time warp is in a different space-time than us, what exactly are we looking at? What does a time-traveler look like when he's travelling in time? Either a statue or a blur, if that. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2005-01-11 3:46:44 PM |
| #1 "Gas whipping around the black hole has no choice but to ride that wave of choppy spacetime sea that distorts everything falling into the black hole," they added. But enough about your lunch with Mike al-Moor, tell us something about space. |
| Posted by: BH 2005-01-11 3:39:57 PM |