Astronomers witness energetic switch on of black hole

https://phys.org/news/2023-07-astronomers-witness-energetic-black-hole.html

by wglb • 3 years ago

74 39 3 years ago

phys.org

dathos• 3 years ago

“Very Large Telescope”, I love this name. Any better ones out there?

mecsred• 3 years ago

The checklist is accurate: https://xkcd.com/1294/

throwaway7868• 3 years ago

Is the "final telescope" massive enough to be its own black hole?

hinkley• 3 years ago

The OWL was cancelled?

Can we propose the Obnoxiously Large Telescope to replace it?

etra0• 3 years ago

Now they're building the ELT –– Extremely Large Telescope.

They're great with names haha.

cyberax• 3 years ago

Don't forget OWL: Overwhelmingly Large Telescope ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telescope ).

FredPret• 3 years ago

They should build one ten times the size of the next largest one, and call it the Quite Sizeable Telescope

ProAm• 3 years ago

There is the "Very Large Array" too! the VLA. I love these naming standards. Way better than any startup or open source project name

willis9362• 3 years ago

Potentially inspired by Very Large Scale Integration.

ck2• 3 years ago

Go read about the solar gravitational lens telescope proposal by physicist Slava Turyshev

It is the most mind blowing thing that could actually be built someday by humans imho, well if we decide to stop blowing all our budget on killing other people

https://google.com/search?q=solar+gravitational+lens

It would be able to image exoplanets, 10 square kilometers for objects 100 light-years away.

floxy• 3 years ago

solar gravitational lens telescope

Here is a great video about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI

...and a paper:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08421

nonameiguess• 3 years ago

Astronomers are great at this. Three postulated categories of dark matter include:

* WIMPs: weakly interacting massive particles

* MACHOs: massive compact halo objects

* RAMBOs: robust associations of massive baryonic objects

There's also the HERO (hyper extremely red object), which isn't quite dark, but close.

imchillyb• 3 years ago

Astronomers and Astrophysicists are great at naming things.

The rest of the scientific community...notsomuch.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uNnq2GrC01o

denton-scratch• 3 years ago

What does it mean for an AGN to "turn on"?

treeman79• 3 years ago

It ate a star.

ars• 3 years ago

But that would take infinite time (as we perceive the event) because of time dilation.

You would not see it "turn on", you would see a slowly, very slowly, changing signal.

slowmovintarget2• 3 years ago

And this is a cosmic burp.

01100011• 3 years ago

It confused me too. At first I thought it meant that a collection of matter became dense enough to form an event horizon and become a black hole. Instead, from https://www.livescience.com/space/black-holes/gargantuan-bla...

If J221951 is indeed a supermassive black hole, its sudden burst of brightness has two possible explanations, according to the researchers. First, the black hole could have pulled an orbiting star into its clutches, stretching and tearing the star to shreds in a messy process called a tidal disruption event or "spaghettification." The second, more mysterious possibility is that the black hole could have shifted states from dormant to actively feeding, as it suddenly began gorging on the fast-moving disk of gas that surrounds it.

SomeRndName112• 3 years ago

Today they witness energetic switch, tomorrow - energetic router.

mrtksn• 3 years ago

And still no reception in the kitchen.

SomeRndName112• 3 years ago

kitchen must be beyond the event horizon.

pixelpoet• 3 years ago

That's because of the CMB (cooking microwave in the background)

civilitty• 3 years ago

Followed by a wireless gamma ray burst. Aimed right at us.

gigatexal• 3 years ago

Morbid but if I’m the future I’m terminally ill and we somehow find a cheat code to travel to a supermassive black hole in years instead of hundreds of millions of years I’d like to hop in a space suit and get launched into one Dave Bowman style.

Astronomers witness energetic switch on of black hole

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