Black Hole Analogue Discovered in South Atlantic | Hacker News Reader

Black Hole Analogue Discovered in South Atlantic

technologyreview.com

58 pointsmpweiher17 comments

That is one of the biggest stretches I've read in a while. Bravo.

tl;dr (emphasis added):

"Solutions to this problem turn out to be mathematically equivalent to photon spheres around black holes in cosmology [...] As an application, we uncover super-coherent material eddies in the South Atlantic ..."

http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.2352

I'm not a physicist, but I interpret this to mean that it isn't an analogy of the gravitational pull of a black hole. Instead, the fluid motion around black holes and large oceanic eddies are mathematically similar.

I wonder if the author knows that Edgar Allan Poe's A Descent into the Maelström is entirely fictional...

Not entirely fictional. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskstraumen

I was hoping this would be about "Dumb Holes" where the medium moves inwards faster than the speed of sound thus not letting any sound escape.

OK, so does that mean we get to make giant robots? I can forgive Guillermo Del Toro for getting the wrong ocean.

I can't forgive Del Toro for making an horrible movie about robots anyway. That was painful to watch.

Aww, come on! Just try turning on your "eight year old switch" and you'll find that it's a really enjoyable movie.

I also believe it's a great family movie that's not a comedy or animation movie (or sappy Disney family movie). The setting is smart enough for a grown up to enjoy (the movie has a lot of "show don't tell" that justify, to some degree, some of the more implausible elements) and the plot is simple enough for a young kid to understand.

With that said, I'm a big fun of the Giant Robot genre of anime, so I probably enjoyed the movie more than the usual moviegoer.

Atlantic hasn't been spared too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Rim_(film)

Does anyone else see the ultimate artifice of a mathematical world of pure logic build upon physically grounded computers .. ie. all modern computing .. as a direct philosophical parallel to this physical phenomena? As change is the only constant, eventually the external system will shift, the boundaries enabling inner-equilibria will break down, and chaos pours in.

Don't worry. That's just the point where you have to turn it off and on again.

Forgive my physics ignorance here, but black holes can suck in matter by becoming arbitarily more dense. This isn't possible for such sinkholes, so how can they suck in stuff without expanding?

> but black holes can suck in matter by becoming arbitarily more dense. This isn't possible for such sinkholes

Correct but this is not the behavior which the sinkholes are mimicking. With out having read the article the behavior that is probably being mimicked by the sink holes is while the sink hole is active the sound waves can not escape, similar to how light does not escape the event horizon of the black hole.

Their are laboratory experiments that mimic similar behavior in fluids to study such physical phenomena as well.

I think they refer to areas of water that are basically still, not moving sort of like the eye of a hurricane.

> they are essentially independent of their environment, surrounded by a seemingly impenetrable boundary and with little, if any, of the fluid inside them leaking out.

The two-dimensional horizon of the gyre on the water's surface does expand, slowly, and is analogous to the three dimensional event horizon of a black hole.

That is to say, the portion of the gyre which extends below the water, which is not visible to us, is analogous to the hyper (or hypo, depending on your frame) dimensional interior of a black hole.

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2007/December/1012070...

Needs at least some empirical validation/dis-confirmation.

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