The placid appearance of NGC 4889 can fool the unsuspecting observer. But the elliptical galaxy, pictured in this new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, harbours a dark secret. At its heart lurks one of the most massive black holes ever discovered.
Located about 300 million light-years away in the Coma Cluster, the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 4889, the brightest and largest galaxy in this image, is home to a record-breaking supermassive black hole. Twenty-one billion times the mass of the Sun, this black hole has an event horizon — the surface at which even light cannot escape its gravitational grasp — with a diameter of approximately 130 billion kilometres. This is about 15 times the diameter of Neptune’s orbit from the Sun. By comparison, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is believed to have a mass about four million times that of the Sun and an event horizon just one fifth the orbit of Mercury.
But the time when NGC 4889’s black hole was swallowing stars and devouring dust is past. Astronomers believe that the gigantic black hole has stopped feeding, and is currently resting after feasting on NGC 4889’s cosmic cuisine. The environment within the galaxy is now so peaceful that stars are forming from its remaining gas and orbiting undisturbed around the black hole.
As the Apollo 10 astronauts’ journey took them around the far side of the moon, the space explorers heard what they described as “outer space type” music, recently declassified transcripts revealed.
The Science Channel series ‘NASA’s Unexplained Files” took a closer look into the sounds the astronauts heard as they lost radio contact during their trip around the moon.
“It’s about an hour on the backside of the moon, away from earth where you lose radio contact,” Apollo 15 Command Module Pilot Al Worden said in the episode.
As Apollo 10 made its way around to the far side of the moon, the astronauts lost radio contact, and began hearing the strange sounds.
“Sounds like, you know, outer-space type music,” one of the astronauts can be heard saying in a NASA recording.
Every show I've watched on blackholes seems to have at least one physicist that hates the idea of a singularity. It really speaks to me for some reason.
Just seems like the fact that the math breaks down is a clear sign that something is wrong. I wish there was more layman explanations on the efforts going on to try and explain singularities but I guess it's not as sexy as "black holes with infinite density and speed!" so no one is making tv shows about that.
who knows the real potential of detecting gravitational waves maybe the missing math to prove singularities. This is extremely exciting to see what physicists do with this
Decent-sized meteor slammed into the South Atlantic a few weeks ago.
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The largest fireball to streak through the Earth's atmosphere since the Chelyabinsk meteor in 2013 was detected over the Southern Atlantic Ocean on Feb. 6, NASA reports.
The recent meteor was detected about 31 kilometres over the South Atlantic, more than 1,000 kilometres off the coast of southern Brazil, NASA reported on its Fireball and Bolide Reports website.
"Now, by pushing Hubble to its limits, an international team of astronomers has shattered the cosmic distance record by viewing the farthest galaxy ever seen. Named GN-z11, this surprisingly bright, infant galaxy is seen as it was 13.4 billion years in the past. The astronomers saw it as it existed just 400 million years after the big bang, when the universe was only three percent of its current age."
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With a liquid nuclear fuel, IMSR achieves high passive safety (for example, it cannot melt down); it is more fuel efficient, more waste efficient and could in the future consume virtually all of its own long-lived waste as well as that of other reactors.
Very interesting.
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How long have you been working for them? Are they legitimate? I've seen a nuclear start-ups come and go over the years. What do you think the odds are of them building a working nuclear reactor?
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"Now, by pushing Hubble to its limits, an international team of astronomers has shattered the cosmic distance record by viewing the farthest galaxy ever seen. Named GN-z11, this surprisingly bright, infant galaxy is seen as it was 13.4 billion years in the past. The astronomers saw it as it existed just 400 million years after the big bang, when the universe was only three percent of its current age."
I suspect this record will last about 30 months or until the Webb gets launched. I actually think it will debunk many things of what people think of the universe, mainly it's age and possibly even the big bang itself.
How long have you been working for them? Are they legitimate? I've seen a nuclear start-ups come and go over the years. What do you think the odds are of them building a working nuclear reactor?
The CTO who developed the patents on the core design has been working on this for the better part of 12 years. I helped found the company in late 2012. We are still in start up mode but are gaining momentum every day, check out the company website about the team we are building and the consortium partners we have.
Based on the commercial conversations I have had there is a great need for a product like ours in the marketplace. I am obviously biased but it is a very competitive space and there are probably a half dozen serious teams working towards very solid gen IV MSR designs. So what I am trying to say is that it is almost certain that one or maybe more than one of these designs will be commercialized but I am unwilling to state a probability of our company in particular being in that group. That said, there are people/groups far more intelligent, influential and wearthy than I am who are betting that we will.
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I suspect this record will last about 30 months or until the Webb gets launched. I actually think it will debunk many things of what people think of the universe, mainly it's age and possibly even the big bang itself.
Yeah that's not likely.
Will they discover that some of the details aren't what we thought? I sure hope so, but the chances of a drastic change in what the age of the universe is or "Debunking" the Big Bang? Not likely. For that to happen, there would have to be a wholesale change in almost every field of physics. Not something that the JWT is going to produce.
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Will they discover that some of the details aren't what we thought? I sure hope so, but the chances of a drastic change in what the age of the universe is or "Debunking" the Big Bang? Not likely. For that to happen, there would have to be a wholesale change in almost every field of physics. Not something that the JWT is going to produce.
It only takes one black swan to disprove the thought that all swans are white.
I don't think if the Webb collects light from a galaxy older than 14.7 billion years destroys physics it just makes the universe older than thought, many times in the last hundred years the age of the universe has got older and I suspect it will happen again very soon.
As for the "Big Bang" there are a growing number of scientists who don't believe in it, rainbow gravity, extra dimensions and quantum mechanics are the new kids in town.
BTW, black holes already throw our "physics" for a loop and my spidey sense tells me black holes are a big part of the universes formation.
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It only takes one black swan to disprove the thought that all swans are white.
I don't think if the Webb collects light from a galaxy older than 14.7 billion years destroys physics it just makes the universe older than thought, many times in the last hundred years the age of the universe has got older and I suspect it will happen again very soon.
As for the "Big Bang" there are a growing number of scientists who don't believe in it, rainbow gravity, extra dimensions and quantum mechanics are the new kids in town.
BTW, black holes already throw our "physics" for a loop and my spidey sense tells me black holes are a big part of the universes formation.
Well yeah, if they did see a galaxy that was older than 14.7 billion years old then we would have to rethink our stance on the age of the universe. The thing is though, if that were true, then we would have to change our thought on a whole lot of fundamental physics. The age of the universe wasn't just determined based on figuring out how old galaxies are.
If we are wrong about the age of the universe, then we are wrong about a lot of other things including general relativity which so far has been a pretty solid piece of work.
So is it possible? Sure. Is it likely? Not very.
Is it possible that we are wrong about the age of the universe? Sure it is, GR may be way out to lunch, but I really wouldn't bet on it.
I'm certainly no expert, but the fact that you are referring to quantum mechanics, a bedrock theory of modern physics that has been around for over a century, as one of "the new kids in town" is a bit telling. Your spidey sense may tell you a lot of things, but if it comes down to that vs 100 years of well proven theory and observation, I know which side my money is on.
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Do Dark Matter & Energy, Singularities and Gravity not fitting into current Quantum Physics theories not scream that we're completely out to lunch?
From my vary amatuer reading, it seems like we have a good idea about how things might work but not knowing what 5/6ths of the universe is made of? "Infinitely" dense and small points of matter? Being completely out to lunch wouldn't surprise me at all. Seems like we've picked the low hanging fruit but have no idea that there is a tree that it's attached too.
Do Dark Matter & Energy, Singularities and Gravity not fitting into current Quantum Physics theories not scream that we're completely out to lunch?
From my vary amatuer reading, it seems like we have a good idea about how things might work but not knowing what 5/6ths of the universe is made of? "Infinitely" dense and small points of matter? Being completely out to lunch wouldn't surprise me at all. Seems like we've picked the low hanging fruit but have no idea that there is a tree that it's attached too.
This is where things start to become philosophical. Will we ever be able to see the tree? I am not sure we will. Something created (in this case, the human mind) will always have lesser complexity that than that of the system that creates it (the universe). As much as we want to understand all the mysteries of the universe, I doubt our minds will ever be able to.
A lot of people look at it like humans are projecting outward into the universe, but I look at it like we are part of the universe looking inward and observing itself. As such, we will probably never see the bigger picture because we aren't even looking in the right direction. We just don't have the vantage point to do it (nor would we recognize the vantage even if it were right in front of us).
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