Black Holes and You

[avandonk]

Interesting doco here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b37taWNyGf0

I thought it was just nucleosynthesis of elements in stars and subsequent super novae that made us.

We owe our existence to the black hole at the centre of our galaxy.


Bert

[Astro_Bot]

Thanks for posting that. I found it very interesting.

The animations were quite good, I thought, giving a good sense of scale ... one gets a sense of the relative size of the black hole to the surrounding space, although how accurate that is, I suppose I don't really know.


[Spoiler Alert]

i'd learned the truth about Quasars some years ago, but it was illuminating (pun intended) to learn again that the brightest points in the Universe are adjacent to the darkest. In fact, one can't exist without the other. I'm sure there's something philosophical in that.

[avandonk]

What I find very unbelievable that we can even start to work this all out. After all we are just smart apes that started questioning our mere existence. There were a few tens of thousands of years of outright brutality without much rational thought even when we were supposedly civilised.

Not much has changed!


Bert

[AG Hybrid (Adrian)]

Originally Posted by avandonk

not much has changed!

Bert

qft

[rally]

Thanks for that one Bert

So to summarize a few key points that come out of this that turns our view of Black Holes upside down

Black Holes are not black - they are white

Black Holes arent dark - they are the single brightest objects in the universe - Quasars - in the order of trillions of suns brightness

Black Holes are not the devourers of the galaxies - they only consume about 0.5% of total galactic mass

Black Holes are not vacuum cleaners - they are massively purging out the reconstituted matter that is created in the surrounding accretion disc maelstrom which has enormous gravity, heat and electrical fields - accelerating it back right out to galactic distances

Black Holes are not the destroyers of galaxies - they are the cocreators of developed galaxies and seemingly the engine that drives them

Simplified somewhat - but about right.

[avandonk]

That is about correct rally.

It is really something to contemplate that our existence is governed by the creation of super massive black holes just after the big bang. One of these black holes went on to control the development of our galaxy?

We still do not know the full story but the evidence is piling up.

The Universe is more strange than we can even imagine!

Bert

[The_bluester (Paul)]

I think I would change that last statement a bit.

I think the universe is more awe inspiring than we could ever imagine. I pity people who have no interest in it.

[rally]

Bert

So is it the chicken or the egg ?
Did the black holes form first in the very early days or did they occur sometime during each galaxies evolution and growth.

Ether way - its all amazing and

Where's MadBad Rob when we need him !

Rally

[multiweb (Marc)]

I found the vid very interesting. Our knowledge of these has certainly grown significantly over the past two decades. Very well presented and produced. It's amazing to see that in all this chaos there is still a simple linear relationship between blackholes and galaxies.

[sjastro]

Fairly interesting stuff.

Surprisingly the documentary didn't go into detail that Cygnus X-1 provides the strongest evidence for the existence of an object with an event horizon.

Cygnus X-1 is an X-ray binary. If one of the components was a white dwarf rather than a Black Hole, the X-ray spectrum would have two distinct signatures. One signature would be from the friction of the gas as described in the documentary, the other from the gas colliding into the white dwarf.

The spectrum of Cygnus only reveals X-rays from gas friction, the most likely explanation is that the object is a Black Hole where X-rays from the collision are not observed due to an event horizon.

Regards

Steven.

[AG Hybrid (Adrian)]

Was rather good video actually! Think I'll watch it a second time.

[mr bruess]

black holes are tears or rips in space time where all laws of physics break down.