What is Digg?156 Comments
- Sikarian, on 01/10/2008, -4/+43Some day, far in the future, we will be having news articles about "Black hole discovered with the mass of 18 billion OJ287 black holes."
- azwaxcats, on 01/10/2008, -3/+27Wow, based on everybody being dugg down this must be an interesting article because it's certainly not being dugg for the snappy comments.
- JimSartor, on 01/10/2008, -0/+2318 Billion suns . . . that's like 10% (give or take a few percentage points) the mass of our galaxy. I wish they would've discussed how large the event horizon on a black hole that massive is . . . because it seems to me that a blackhole of that magnitude would have an enormous event horizon, certainly greater than the 1/5 of a light year orbit of the secondary black hole. If anyone knows the math to figure this one out, I would be curious to see it.
- mburk, on 01/10/2008, -4/+20Dude, it's the biggest black hole in the KNOWN universe. The headline is close enough. Calm down.
- inactive, on 01/10/2008, -4/+18But the cosmos may include various universes.
- Qeveren, on 01/11/2008, -0/+13The Schwarzchild radius of a black hole is given by the formula Rs = 2GM / c^2. For a black hole of 18 billion solar masses, this gives a radius of roughly 53 billion kilometers, or 363 AU.
Were this black hole centered on our Sun, the 'surface' of the event horizon would be almost 10 times further away than Pluto. - UrinalPooper, on 01/10/2008, -3/+15This is what pisses me off about new scientist, why doesn't TFA at least mention the equipment for anyone who might be curious? I mean, c'mon guys, you have the word 'scientist' in the name of your rag.
It would have taken up all of a paragraph and all the reporter had to do was ask. - BlueSkyfish, on 01/10/2008, -0/+10"Why do you think the space between stars is black"
It's not. It's transparent because there's nothing there (aside from a few molecules of hydrogen). That's why we're able to see those stars.
Supernovas don't cause a collapse in space. the star collapses and makes the density so high that gravity is focused to a point where light can't escape. Black holes aren't anything mystic, just a big clump of matter. - gilgamesh23, on 01/10/2008, -2/+12theoretically...
At the center of every black hole is a singularity of unimaginable mass. - Qeveren, on 01/11/2008, -0/+9Oop, I forgot to add, that's just slightly more than one-half of a percent of a light year.
- Impact0115, on 01/10/2008, -0/+8Really? You can fathom an infinitely dense amount of matter stored in an infinitely small area of space, so dense that it warps space and time around it in ways that no one is completely sure of?
I'm impressed, duckyinc. - michael1406, on 01/10/2008, -1/+8No, that sucks.
- jalupeno104, on 01/10/2008, -0/+7in response to over900000, blackholes are theoretically singularities to our knowledge. they're formed when a huge sun explodes and all thats left is a small ball of mass. this mass rips a hole in the fabric of space.
think about it this way: space and time are knit into a blanket. this blanket is outstretched, kind of like you're about catch someone falling out of a building.
think of a big sun as a bowling ball in the middle of the blanket. the blanket will begin to sag down in the middle where the ball is. planets are like ping pong balls that someone rolled around the bowling ball. the effect of the ping pong ball going closer to the basketball is gravity.
now imagine the bowling ball suddenly turned into a thumbtack, except the tack has the same mass as the bowling ball. what happens?
the tack would rip a hole in the blanket while theoretically dragging the middle to the ground. objects would then travel infinitely fast towards that tack. this is what happens with a black hole. - 1gunners4, on 01/10/2008, -6/+12The only thing I think of when I read this that "In the long run, we're all dead."
- MadOtaku, on 01/10/2008, -2/+7Our sun won't supernova; it's not big enough. It will roast all the inner planets when it swells up before dying, though.
- otakushark, on 01/10/2008, -0/+5Gravity is "just a theory" too.
- Matteos, on 01/10/2008, -2/+7So basically he is right because he "can't imagine".
- CasaMan, on 01/10/2008, -0/+4Evolution is probably "still a THEORY" by your standards.. That doesn't mean it isn't true or observable..
- jgzman, on 01/10/2008, -0/+4If it is not a singularity, it is not a black hole.
An object that is 'almost' a black hole would have a very large mass, possibly enough mass to capture light in the same way as a black hole, but it would have significantly different qualities.
Of course, I could be wrong about that. Pure speculation. - stealthrocket, on 01/10/2008, -1/+5Here's my theory of the universe based on pure intuition. All the black holes will eventually eat everything up, including each other, and there will be one super massive black hole. When that happens all the energy contained in it won't be able to hold together anymore and it will explode in another Big Bang and the entire process will start over again.
- terminal157, on 01/10/2008, -1/+5They merge, as the two in this story will in the cosmically near future.
- unearth, on 01/10/2008, -1/+4For a guy with the name RepublicansSuck, you sure sound a lot like some of them.
- inactive, on 01/11/2008, -0/+3FAG!
- inactive, on 01/10/2008, -9/+12Are all black holes a singularity or do some bulk to them? I can't imagine cramming all that mass into a single point.
- michael1406, on 01/10/2008, -0/+3Interesting point...what WOULD happen if black holes met?
- unearth, on 01/11/2008, -0/+3Both of us are talking, but only one of us is making sense.
- norman619, on 01/10/2008, -4/+7Man quite a fettish you got there.
- snoonoo, on 01/10/2008, -3/+5Tom Tucker: And now time for Ollie Williams with the latest astronomy dicoveries. Ollie?
Ollie: HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO......
Tom Tucker: Thanks, Ollie. - terminal157, on 01/10/2008, -0/+2Good call. I would assume so, though it generally makes more sense for us to refer to things happening from our perspective rather than when they will actually happen in "objective" time (if such a thing could be said to exist).
- inactive, on 01/10/2008, -1/+3A -black- hole? That would be quite a stretch.
- MadOtaku, on 01/10/2008, -1/+3I don't think so; the cosmos is defined by The Oxford American Dictionary as "the universe seen as a well-ordered whole." Is the scientific definition different or do we need a new term for anything outside/around the universe?
- norman619, on 01/10/2008, -2/+4I'd like to see battling black holes.
- Cebo, on 01/10/2008, -4/+6If the hole is 3.5 billion light years away and will merge with the smaller one in 10k years, doesn't that mean it already happened, but we can't see it because we're looking in the past? So with a good enough telescope you could see it... well not directly anyway.
- inactive, on 01/11/2008, -2/+4wrong. . . cosmo is the owner of spacely sprockets
- r3becca, on 01/11/2008, -0/+2This is somewhat inaccurate. When matter collapses into a black hole it becomes more dense but not more massive.
For instance, if our sun suddenly became a blackhole earth would continue on the same orbit.
Also objects (particles with mass) do not travel infinitely fast even when falling into a black hole. - michael1406, on 01/10/2008, -1/+3The Annunaki will have taken over before then. :)
- Fordi, on 01/11/2008, -0/+1No one's mentioned it... but you're getting dugg down just for the sheer moronity of it.
you gotta understand: black hole jokes referencing fat/slutty women are just too damned easy. Hell, five years ago, this would have been a Courtney Love joke. - Fordi, on 01/11/2008, -1/+2Yes.
- duckyinc, on 01/11/2008, -0/+1please note that a blackhole is just a small dot..
- Tetraca, on 01/11/2008, -0/+1Entropy can only increase over time. If we don't destroy ourselves, if the sun doesn't destroy us, and if any anomalies such as black holes don't kill us, we'll end up dying of entropy billions or trillions of years into the future anyways. Then, it's gone and impossible to raise back from the dead unless external energy is applied.
- Fordi, on 01/11/2008, -0/+1You realize that observation of a black hole is, in fact, theoretical confirmation.
Right? - JimSartor, on 01/11/2008, -0/+1That places the second black hole at a distance of 40 diameters approx and that seems like a VERY small system (in accordance to their relative diameters and distance apart). Crazy to think about at that scale anyway.
- duckyinc, on 01/11/2008, -0/+1talk about you loosing your minimum job soon
- etterisbetter, on 01/10/2008, -0/+1Do you even understand what a scientific theory is?
- duckyinc, on 01/11/2008, -0/+1million years of acceleration?
- etterisbetter, on 01/10/2008, -0/+1The heliocentric model of the solar system is a theory too.
- Legoman513, on 01/10/2008, -0/+1Thats exaclty what he was trying to say....if by what we see it looks like it will collide in 10k years, when you factor in the lights ravelling difference it actually already happened a LONG time ago. But I think the 10k merge guess was taking the delay into effect probably.
- coleki, on 01/11/2008, -0/+1lmao
- Fordi, on 01/11/2008, -0/+1They meet, become trapped in each others event horizons, and eventually collapse in a burst of xrays.
From the outside, it'd look pretty boring. - Fordi, on 01/11/2008, -0/+1Not true.
A black hole is any mass that has collapsed past its Schwarzschild radius (the radius from the center of a mass where escape velocity exceds light speed). At that point, matter has more or less no choice but to collapse into degenerate matter, then singularity. Or that's how the theory goes. -
Show 51 - 100 of 157 discussions
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is