Supermassive Black Hole Eruption Near Earth Spanning 16 Times Full Moon
scitechdaily.com
scitechdaily.com
So a person that understands the topic should immediately understand we are talking about relatively close galaxy.
Sure, but a person who doesn't would receive the message more clearly if it were stated as "Supermassive black hole eruption near milky way". Otherwise I could write "Supermassive black hole eruption near New York" and be equally correct.
I suspect the potential for misunderstanding was the reason the headline was chosen in this form, however ...
I know research on priming has got some well deserved criticism, but there is no doubt basic framing works and this article either plays this effect for purpose or is scarily unaware of it.
That explains a lot of clickbait!
The purpose of the title of any article is to attract attention, so from that point you could say every title is clickbait.
Where I define "too far" (or actual clickbait) is when the title is dishonest about its contents or is purposefully omitting important information that makes the article much less interesting than the title suggests.
In this case the title was actually both truthful and contained relatively complete description of what is included in the article. Could they say "near Milky Way"? Well... they could, but "near Earth" is also factually correct.
And 12 million light years is actually quite close for any new supermassive black hole-related findings.
A lot of clickbait is technically correct including many of the dreaded "<n> <x> that <y> - you won't guess number <z>".
While observable Universe will always be 93 billion light years in diameter, it is worth noting that everything is moving away from everything faster than gravity can counteract. That is, the Causally Disconnected (un-observable) Universe is inflating faster, the bigger it gets.
But yes, farther out than Andromeda.
Sun, likewise, of course.
So these radio lobes reach out another moon-width from both sides of your thumb.
I believe part of this misconception comes from that when we look at something, we're only paying attain to +/- 15° while the bifocal range is 120° and the full field of view with both eyes is about 200°. Additionally, the field of view of the photographs that involve the sun or moon are often in the 5° to 15° range.
That narrow range photograph - https://www.deviantart.com/shagie/art/Crescent-Moonset-70823... and that has a 3.4° field of view on the short axis.
This is closer to the regular field of view - https://www.deviantart.com/shagie/art/Moon-and-sunset-318111... though I shot it portrait rather than landscape. That has a 27° field of view on the short axis and a 40° field of view on the long axis.
Another aspect of the moon and its size and the sky sphere - it moves at a fairly good clip. The sun is easier to think of though, it moves through 360° is 24h. That gives 15°/h or 0.25°/m. Every two minutes, the sun moves a solar diameter across the sky the moon has a similar amount of motion over a short period of time. This makes it difficult to take long exposures of the moon without a tracking mount.
Try taking a picture of the moon with a cell phone (even one with the best in the market camera) and be prepared to be disappointed.
From this, I learned two things: (1) The moon is much smaller in the sky than you think it is. (2) Take a picture of a white wall or similar thing to expose an entire frame so that additional frames can be calculated form that first (or last or both) frame and the proper cuts of the film can be made.
While it's a little dated (digital has come a long way), if you are interested in it with a "real" camera... hunt up a copy of Heavenly Bodies: The Photographer's Guide to Astrophotography by Bert P Krages.
No blackhole, no jets. Seems a bit pedantic to mention that the observed jets aren't crossing the event horizon.
Is that a coincidence, or did this SMBH eat one of those enormous stars that's the diameter of Venus' orbit?
It would be tricky to get it to swallow a star so big before that went supernova, while on the way in, on its own initiative. Whether the resulting black hole would then be swallowed up, or also be flung out at near light-speed with the rest of the ejecta, is an interesting question.
> As the black hole feeds on in-falling gas, it ejects material at near light-speed, causing ‘radio bubbles’ to grow over hundreds of millions of years.
au contraire, enormous (in terms of mass not volume) but dying Neutron stars are so compressed under their own gravity, some are barely 12 to 25 kilometers in diameter of highly condensed Iron and other stable atomic arrangements, and may be spinning 40,000 times per minute on their own axis. Sometimes, there are two of those in a binary system, orbiting each other, on a collision course for a Kilonova, spraying out bazillion tonnes of star and planet making substances across a Galaxy.
A blackhole gulping Neutron Stars down would make for an interesting event!
Any civilization interested in longevity would get the hell away from any galaxy as soon as it could manage.
Now, on a more serious tone, we may want some contingency plans with underground environments and something to preserve some life for long enough we could be able to re-seed a biosphere on the surface.
Useful for ice ages too.
Now imagine it as the start of a story - we terraform Mars, or Venus, only to trigger a re-seeding of the now friendly environment by long buried machines left by a dead civilization.
Speaking of underground environments, Mercury would be an excellent location.
Are there any perpetually shaded areas? If so, the 88 day deadline could be extended by as much as we want just by sending supplies in advance.
And having between 4 and 10 times as much sunshine we could even generate some power from the light reflected in the crater/canyon rim.
I think we could be less than 5 years away from landing a Starship in a crater on Mercury.
Probably you find a pair of rogue gas giants, and set them orbiting one another out in interstellar space, arranged so one is always positioned lbetween your planet and the nearest magnetar.
A computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross section of necessary skills. Of course it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition. Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. But, ah, with the proper breeding techniques, and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years.
This is one piece of evidence for the existence of dark matter.
The orbits are not even nice ellipses. Those only happen with point or (equivalently) spherical masses. The Milky Way is a quite irregular shape, and we are orbiting inside it. Our path bobs up and down through the galactic plane as we orbit, and not just once per orbit like a planet, but over and over.
The planets like the sun that formed from the same gas cloud are long gone, stirred into the galactic soup.
https://slate.com/technology/2014/01/moon-and-andromeda-rela...
I normally don’t put much emphasis or thought of our space or size in the galaxy or universe. However, it is very revealing how we are very much “a pale blue dot” within perfect distance to our sun and moon, and are a very special species on an amazing planet. We are not insignificant. Indeed, we are the exact opposite.
It’s a clickbait addition to the title by the original authors that is already causing confusion in the comments here.
The galaxy in question is 12 million light years away. That is (literally) not astronomically close.
There aren’t that many big galaxies in the radius.
I know it's lame to comment on the single stupid thing in an article, but this is absurd.
By my math 99.987% of the universe is further away than 12 million light years. As mentioned in the article it's so big that from earth it's 16 times larger than the moon (as viewed from earth of course).
Seems reasonable to consider 0.012% of the universe "near earth" when talking about galaxies or blackholes at the center of a galaxy.