Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars
hubblesite.org
hubblesite.org
- Near the center of a galaxy, where stars are so closely packed together that the night sky is filled with bright lights, perhaps illuminating their world to what we experience around twilight, or even brighter.
- Far removed from the center of a galaxy, or even on a rogue star that has escaped its galaxy early on. Very few stars visible in the sky.
- Inside a 'thick' nebula, obscuring all other entities in the sky except for their own star and planets. Imagine an interstellar object like Oumuamua passing through and the complete perplexity of a civilization observing it and wondering where it could have come from.
- A double planet system.
- A system where the planet's orbit is highly elliptic, or where the precession of a tidally locked planet causes day/night cycles.
This is almost the exact premise of Life, the Universe and Everything, the third book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.
Did you mean a double star system? Or something like Earth-Moon where the size difference between the two bodies is much lesser?
For another, imagine having a moon so big it can completely cover the sun... and just the right size and distance to only block the photosphere, leaving the corona visible without instruments. What a show that'd be, what wild myths the life there might make up.
Similarly to the alien planet in Eric Flint's "Mother of Demons"; there was a permanent thick cloud cover, and the the slowly moving sky illumination due to the unseen sun was called "the mother of pearl" by the locals.
I also like the idea of living in a dense globular cluster. Interstellar probes and, later, manned missions would be feasible quite early into civilization's technological development - since you're just a few light-weeks (or less) from another star, not a few light-years like us.
> Therefore, it is still possible that planets exist around main sequence stars in globular clusters, although at small numbers because of the low metallicity, and at orbital periods of >~10 days.
[1] Expected Planets in Globular Clusters (https://arxiv.org/abs/0704.1067)
- Active galaxy with a jet stretching perpendicularly to the galaxy plane for distances much bigger than the galaxy's size, shinning in all the wavelengths.
- Planet around a double star one of which is a black hole or a neutron star.
Just a precaution so we don't get sued.
I'm not sure that would be very habitable. Unless they're far apart, the neutron star/black hole would be accreting matter from its companion and the accretion disk would be emitting large amounts of x-rays. In some cases, they can occasionally increase in luminosity by a factor of 10, emitting powerful bursts of x-rays.
Wikipedia says the magnetic field of a neutron star is between 10^8 and 10^15 times the Earth's. The amount of energy in a magnetic field that strong is mind-boggling. Anything anywhere near a neutron star will be bathed in intense broadband radiation, and whipped about by a rapidly-rotating magnetic field. Not a nice place to set up camp.
My understanding is this is unfavorable for life due to any planets being constantly sanitized by too many nearby stars going supernova
> Far removed from the center of a galaxy, or even on a rogue star that has escaped its galaxy early on. Very few stars visible in the sky.
My understanding is this is also unlikely since a total lack of nearby stars would deprive a star system of the heavier elements needed to make molecules out of anything more interesting than helium and hydrogen.
It’s possible that a happy medium between too many or few is needed for life (or at least highly favored along a bell curve along which our conditions are more likely to be near the top)
You'd be able to peer through the nebula with higher frequency bands than visible light, no?
If a civilisation is able to notice an interstellar object like ’Oumuamua, they are probably advanced enough to observe what's outside their nebula.
There might be interesting phenomena going on right now that we don't know about just because they're too far awar from what our natural senses can detect.
Wouldn't this be approximately the same star density we see when NOT looking in the plane of the milky way?
To me, the real images are much more exciting. You don’t need fake clarity and fake colour when you’re seeing a (candidate) high speed black hole sucking the life out of some fricking ginormous balls of flaming nuclear fusion.
It's understandable. If you show the actual figures to a layman, many of them would respond in disbelief or disappointment. You have to build a bridge, and that begins with illustration. It's a communication and education tool.
Exactly… I never understood the point of making science more accessible to the masses, if the compromise was making the actual science inaccessible to the inquiring mind. There’s no reason there can’t be a simple abstract followed by the actual science and associated images / maths.
This means that the aren’t being exposed to reality and how we can use such noisy low resolution images to make important discoveries. They are lead to believe that there is no advancement that they can potentially follow a career to achieve. The work is done and they shouldn’t aspire to make science better.
The JWST has been an excellent example of what can be achieved by showing the damn images.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/hubble-sees-possib...
Not sure what the deal is with this hubblesite.org…
Edit: Ah ok, interesting… It’s entirely legit. The “about us” page says the website is produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute (https://www.stsci.edu).
The graphic does specify that it is an illustration, but I agree that it could explicitly mention that it's an artist's rendition of the (authors' physical interpretation) of the astronomical observations.
"Oh I have it! In addition to all the incomprehensible things in the universe, we happen to live in a star system that is extremely, extremely rare and exeptional, unlike the rest of the universe!"
Maybe we are not special. But we can accidentally be one of the first.
It may be that prokaryotic life is common, but the mitochondria and plastids of eukaryotes took a very long time to emerge (absent for more than half of the total habitable life of the earth).
Was it this billion years or that billion years
probability of our experience matching another planet’s experience in the same time frame is low
Chloroplasts enabled direct harvest of photons from our parent star.
We are actually older than the plants.
These are going to leave a signature in the gas of an exoplanet, if they happen.
If some planet had oxygen rich atmosphere from the get go it might have sped up the evolution of life by a billion years or few.
Not an expert, but mitochondria didn't "emerge." Mitochondria co-evolved as bacteria, merged and became organelles through complex protein-import machinery and insertion into inner membranes of protein carriers for extracting energy for the host cell.
This was the ignition of complex, multicellular biology. What else could explain it?
I will admit that I thought they were closer to the Cambrian Explosion. This is much farther away than I thought.
"Eukaryotes emerged approximately 2.2 billion years ago, during the Proterozoic eon, likely as flagellated phagotrophs."
I think it is a matter of semantics because it seemed like you have a different understanding of the meaning of the word emerge then the person you are responding to. Within the context of the original post, the word emerge has nothing to do with the physical location of mitochondria and the eukaryotic cell. Instead, the meaning of emergence was to come into existence from non-existence. That is to say, your objection relies on a different semantic understanding of the word used. It is unclear to me if you don't understand this meaning or if you understand it but disagree with others using it.
Similarly, I would argue that a "mitochondria" not living in a parent so is not a mitochondria at all. Again, this is a matter of semantics. It relies on the meaning of the word mitochondria and how it is defined.
Bay way of comparison, is a person who buys a house homeless or a homeowner? Are humans prototocells because our evolutionary history can be traced back to them?
I'm not sure why you're continuing to try to make it clear to me that you're not wrong when we simply disagree, but your statement here employs nominal fallacy, or naming fallacy. Mitochondria is that same bacteria that it used to be prior to entering into a symbiotic relationship within the cell. It's a relatively new scientific revelation that mitochondrion organelles lived as bacteria discrete from its current function inside a cell. We may call this that and that this, to keep track of function, but it doesn't mean that a spade isn't a shovel.
2) In any case, mitochondria have evolved, and are now distinct species from their ancestors that cannot survive outside the cell.
3) Fittingly, a spade is pointed, while a shovel is square tipped.
That would mess with the scientists.
the range of possible observations that we could make about the universe is limited by the fact that observations could only happen in a universe capable of developing intelligent life in the first place
For residents of our hypothetical planet, that moment, which seems very important to me, would be hard to have!
You see it a lot in space conversations because it covers planetary gravity in an interesting way.
It is, somehow, very bleak and pessimistic compared to your average (western?) sci-fi.
I started reading the first book before I started using this method, and abandoned the series a couple times but saw it coming up so often in sci-fi recommendations I kept wanting to get through it
I found the first half of book one elicited no interest in reading in my down time, but was just barely interesting enough to not quit listening.
By the second half of book one and the entire rest of the series (plus the author approved fan fiction fourth book) I completely gave up on the audiobook because the story was so good that I wanted to read it as quickly as possible. I actually switched to reading on my phone in the shower over listening.
It starts off slow but gets good and stays extremely good. One of my favorite series.
Otherwise it'll be like drinking from a firehose.
I don't know, I lived in China for 9 years, and scifi and fantasy media were highly discouraged by the party (as mentioned in the wiki link), and no one I knew had anything to recommend that was originally written in Chinese. When Three Body Problem came out, people went nuts. Every nerd and engineer in the country read it.
There's the rub. Access to the world's cultural resources is highly limited in China. They've outright firewalled the internet.
Liu's writing is incredible, but he reminds me of George RR Martin or.....bare with me..Vince McMahon. Unable to get beyond the "fleshing out" phase.
The standalone book Old Man's War is also incredible.
And of course....Hyperion is the king of the entire genre. If you haven't read those I'd highly recommend it, will change your life.
If you go in expecting adventure fiction, then it's not enjoyable. It's more like reading something like Olaf Stapledon.
[1] The Three-Body Problem (trilogy)
[2] A Fire Upon the Deep
If you don't want to read the books at least check out the idea of the "Zones of Thought" that is the interesting concept in the second book.
Those living on such a planet might even reasonably conclude that advanced life on a planet within a galaxy, like our own, was very unlikely.
Fleeing probably makes the most sense for any species.
And what would we do if we saw it? It's likely beyond the cosmological horizon, meaning that a reply is impossible.
Maybe this is part of a galactic-scale engineering project?
Actual pic btw: https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01GWQ1FTQCCZS72F2GPD4QTJXK.png
Send a flair out lasting over a hundred millions years, letting others know, “hey, we lived here.”
Is it possible for a layperson like myself to spend an evening casually looking through the trove of Hubble images or are they only for astronomers? I googled around but I couldn't find an archive anywhere.
Like some Galactus-like beings is just casually playing pong with black holes just for some fun.
What's the speed of sound in intergalactic space, anyway?
But most probable speed of hydrogen molecules at 2.7K is surprisingly low - 150m/s. This speed can be used as “sound” speed approximation in the intergalactic space.
> Then another galaxy came along with its own supermassive black hole... One of the black holes robbed momentum from the other two black holes and got thrown out of the host galaxy.
I'm obviously not an expert, and this comment is obviously way off the topic, but allow me to wonder: If one supermassive black hole like the our Sagittarius A* can be that dominance, isn't this makes the black hole the most important "asset" of the galaxy? By that, I mean, if you somehow destroyed the back hole (which is what Kurzgesagt was trying to convince people to do, hehe), the galaxy will fall a part, assuming the bulge alone don't have enough gravity to hold the galaxy together.
If you let me expand this a little: So if there are advanced alien civilizations in our galaxy, maybe they want to take control of that black hole? Since that location is the only location unique in the entire galaxy.
If I can expand this a little further: As we human currently observed it, Sagittarius A* is currently quite stable (???) with no sign of disappearing. Can this suggest that in our galaxy there is not a single civilization advanced enough to (or want to) modify Sagittarius A* in a significant way, or maybe black hole just cannot be influenced easily even for a higher tier civilization (maybe wormhole is too hard too)?
I know I missed many details. It's just a shower thought first came out after I docked at a space station few light years away from Sagittarius A* in the game Elite Dangerous. Throwing the idea out there.
BTW: If someone is going to write a novel based on this, you need to pay for the idea up front :)
It is also possible, that they don't want to modify the black hole, because it is working as intended?
Why would we change the sun, even if we could?
But apart from that, yes, a civilisation would need to bery very, very advanced to significantly alter a black hole, like the one at the center of our galaxy.
So my intuition is your novel would need to ignore a few physical facts, but its fiction after all :D
A galactic core has a lot of mass that could be stolen.
This is the basic mechanism of star formation everywhere and it probably isn't much different in this particular system. The strongest gravitational forces are caused by dark matter haloes which are usually larger than the galaxy itself and much heavier. On smaller scales, the main gravitational force is caused by the collapsing gas itself. Both probably still exist in this system and provide the required gravity for stars to form.
A note: While dust has an impact on star formation (it might help the gas to cool, for example) it is not a required ingredient for stars to form. In fact, the first stars formed at a time when there was no dust in the universe.
The article doesn't say how far away this thing is. If it's very distant, and the Universe we're looking at is young, presumably the gas is mainly hydrogen and helium. Maybe, given another billion years or so, the newly-formed stars will coalesce into a new galaxy?
Like so many of the most interesting discoveries.
I suspect they make huge part of dark matter.
Does that mean halfway across the known universe, or is it just a figure of speech for "a really long way away"? (Or is my assumption that the universe is infinite wrong?)
14 minutes?