Supermassive Black Hole Is Living Oxymoron - http://clapway.com/2015/08/12/super-massive-black-hole-099/

As it stands today, the universe is brimming with phenomena we’ve never seen before. Some of them reveal mind-boggling contradictions in our own presumed understanding of the cosmos. Recently, researchers at the University of Michigan found such a cosmic paradox.

BLACK HOLE, COLORFUL PROMISES

The smallest supermassive black hole ever detected was just catalogued by astronomers. At the center of a dwarf disk galaxy known as RGG 118, the odd hole in the cosmos is 340 million light years away from Earth, and will likely help us understand how black holes evolve in conjunction with their host galaxies since first joining the universe over 13 billion years ago.

“Black holes come in several different varieties,” wrote The Christian Science Monitor’s Noelle Swan. “The smallest kind, called a primordial black hole, is the size of a single atom, but it contains the mass of a large mountain. The most widely understood black holes are known as stellar black holes and can contain 20 times the mass of the sun within a ball of space with a diameter of about 10 miles.”

BLACK HOLE RGG 118 IN CONTEXT

However, Ms. Swan reminds us that a supermassive black hole can be big enough to swallow our entire solar system whole. So, despite this latest black hole being relatively small, its cosmic portent is certainly nonetheless maximal. Astronomers estimate RGG 118 to be roughly 50,000 times the mass of our own Sun. This is still 100 times less massive than the supermassive black hole lying at the center of our Milky Way, and 200,000 times smaller than the largest black hole yet catalogued, reported the .

This little devil might make big epistemic waves for the astronomical community.

HOW DO BLACK HOLES FORM WITH THEIR HOST GALAXY?

“These little galaxies can serve as analogues to galaxies in the earlier universe,” remarked Vivienne Baldassare, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and co-author of the study, in a recent press release.

“For galaxies like our Milky Way, we don’t know what it was like in its youth,” continued Baldassare, “[b]y studying how galaxies like this one are growing and feeding their black holes and how the two are influencing each other, we could gain a better understanding of how galaxies were forming in the early universe.”

---

FEELING DARK? LIGHTEN UP WITH LIFELIGHT’S BLUE LIGHT THERAPY!

 

Supermassive Black Hole Is Living Oxymoron

Is The Universe Dying? - http://clapway.com/2015/08/12/is-the-universe-dying-102/

The early, active, bright, busy happy universe is already losing steam, you see, it isn’t the sort of thing to keep popping and growing as a poet or author of sentiments might hope. Unfortunately, this universe is a friend to decadence, and as our chronometers go on, so too will the expanse of space the universe occupies, but the relatively finite amount of energy will become so thinly spread that nothing will be anything but the darkest, the darkest nothing, for billions of miles, hundreds of light years, thousands of light years, eventually you could walk the distance of the existent universe from one corner to the other without seeing a single spark because it’s all gone.

THE UNIVERSE IS DECADENT

This inevitable de-cadence to nihilism was presented in a paper to the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Honolulu on Monday, August 10th. In the paper, the procedure of a group of researchers is limned, in which 200,000 galaxies’ light from across the cosmos is compared. What they found is this universe’s end: there is about half as much total energy as there was 2 billion years ago.

THE UNIVERSE IS TIRING

Before this is prematurely dismissed as irrelevant out of theoretical impracticality, let’s check our semantics and make sure we’re speaking of the same thing. The observable universe is an incredibly vast empty space littered with dense strands of energy, with stars, nebulae and galaxies, but most ubiquitous are the dark unknown particles which rule scientists’ cosmological models. The physical laws governing the behavior of the universe predict that this massive amount of energy will tend toward homogeneity. Eventually, every particle in every star will run out of hydrogen to burn and go quiet, as it continues to spread across the breadth of space. The universe is not a fiction writer, so why should it specialize in novelty?

“So what that means is the universe won’t be hospitable for life anywhere,” laments John Beacom, physicist at Ohio State University. “Not for our life in the Milky way, not anywhere else in any other galaxy. We’re clearly on this inexorable trend where they are all running out of fuel.”

SENSE AND SENTIMENT

But a reader’s reluctance to accept the universe’s death may actually stem from an anthropocentrism: the universe was never a living thing. “We’re using this metaphor of the death of the universe, I’m not entirely sure what that means,” remarked Leonard Finkelman, a philosopher at Linfield University in Oregon. Truly, those of us trying to be optimists may in this case just be too narcissistically obsessed with Personal Meaning to see what’s staring you in the face, if you would just look at what we’re talking about. Space. Not a bourgeois cocktail party. A dark, inhuman, empty, boundless abyss, of which you are seeing only a relatively microscopic tip. Space.

As far as life is concerned, it is a short-lived, recent novelty that struts and frets its hour upon a miniscule stage, and consciousness may very well be nothing but a mistake in human evolution, one whose highest activity is the contemplation of its own absurdity–that it believe it needs a reason to exist so badly in the face of the cosmos’ ultimate indifference.

Don’t look to vast expanses of the universe for Personal Meaning. Nietzsche once said that whatever you choose, take care that you also choose its eternal return. So before you queue Wagner’s Tristan, consider that we’re here, now, making our own choices, and (save for the possibility of H.G. Wells’ Time Machine) we need not found our worth on the ultimate destiny of the cosmos. Generally, creating a little bit more than speculating will spare anyone from nihilistic ennui.

---

 

WANT YOUR KIDS TO LIVE MEANINGFUL LIVES?

Is The Universe Dying?

This #GammaRay burst is outsizing reality and turning toward the #SciFi of the video game world. - http://clapway.com/2015/08/05/halo-the-cosmos-evolved-for-master-chief-253/

Our children may never know the revolutionary pleasure the video game Halo: Combat Evolved was when it appeared with a story, plot and overall entertainment value that put everything else to shame. But the universe won’t. We found Halo. In a manner of speaking. Astronomers and the general public have been inspired by the amalgam of structures discovered in deep space, however, today they announced the existence of an unimaginably massive structure composed of a loose ellipse of galaxies, roughly 5 billion light years in diameter.

EVEN MASTER CHIEF CAN’T LAP THIS HALO

This intergalactic halo was limned indirectly by 9 observed gamma-ray bursts, and has been triangulated at about 7 billion light years’ distance. From the ground, the ring spans a distance that’s 70 times the diameter of a full moon.

WHAT ARE GAMMA-RAY BURSTS?

When a super-massive star runs out of hydrogen, instead of just expanding and eventually releasing its outer layers in a relatively calm exhalation (like our sun will), it violently implodes, moving into itself so rapidly that the curvature of space time itself cannot keep up with the increasing gravity well, and a black hole forms. When it’s born, the black hole releases spectacular beams of energy coming out at a normal angle with respect to the black hole’s rotation. If earth is lucky (or unlucky) enough to be aligned with these beams, a climactic signal registers on scientists’ equipment, and with the information contained in the signal (e.g., direction, magnitude, dissipation), astronomers are able to ascertain the distance and location of the gamma-ray burst.

You can actually look up all observed gamma-ray bursts to date on the Gamma Ray Burst Online Index, which catalogues each and every gamma-ray burst’s position, so you can see where we fit into the big black picture. Gulp.

BUT WHAT ABOUT HALO?

The thing is that these 9 gamma-ray bursts, or rather black holes, must be somehow interacting, related, connected, since they are a similar distance from earth. The researchers involved have shared that there is actually a 1 in 20,000 chance that gamma-ray bursts would be distributed in such a way so closely resembling the Halo of science fiction. This actually means that this impossibly macro-geometry is actually a very likely phenomenon.

But latest cosmological models preclude the very possibility of such cosmic structures.

COSMIC CONTRADICTIONS

Currently, cosmology (the study of the cosmos), holds that the universe ought to have a fairly uniform distribution of matter and energy on macro scales. This is actually a precept of the science, called the “Cosmological Principle,” and it’s already found ground in the form of NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and Europe’s Planck Space Telescope, both of which catalogue cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation.

Until recently, the upper-limit for cosmic structures was 1.2 billion light-years across, but this gamma-ray burst halo is 5 times the size of that limit. That’s a theoretical discrepancy no trade could ignore. What’s more, another structure of gamma-ray bursts was discovered, spanning a distance of 10 billion light-years.

What madness is responsible for this super-geometry? Some macro-cosmology holds that there are areas of our universe which clump together in web-like strands that flow for billions of light-years, creating “holes” in the universe, where little to no matter or energy is present. But presently, this newest structure creates a super-void that puts even the most superlative absences to shame.

“If we are right, this structure contradicts the current models of the universe. It was a huge surprise to find something this big — and we still don’t quite understand how it came to exist at all,” exclaimed Balazs to the Royal Astronomical Society.

Originally reported by the Royal Astronomical Society.

---

 

Enter the appealing void of space with Space Scouts!:

Halo: The Cosmos Evolved For Master Chief

#ALMA has given us the ability to peer #BackInTime and learn about the #origins of the #universe. - http://clapway.com/2015/07/22/galaxies-800-million-years-after-big-bang-limned-by-alma-112/

We all know about the Big Bang, but the formation of the first galaxies has always been a mystery to scientists, until now. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope, scientists have gained the ability to peer into the depths of foggy beginnings, when hydrogen gas was just starting to collect and condense into galaxies, in the first several hundred million years following the Big Bang.

ALMA TELESCOPE IS NOT A TIME MACHINE

The thing about light is that it doesn’t travel instantaneously. Travelling at about 300 million meters per second, even the darkest patches of the sky are filled with light that’s travelled so far that it actually outlived the object it originated from. This scientific fact is why the Sun as we know it from the Earth’s surface is actually the Sun as it appeared approximately 8 minutes ago.

ALMA TELESCOPE IS A TIME MACHINE

Recently, astronomers using ALMA peered far enough back in time that they were able to view galaxies existing 800 million years after the Big Bang. Ironically, this was only made possible by the light of glowing ionized carbon, emitted from the gaseous clouds giving birth to stars.

One of these early galaxies named BDF 3299 was specifically recognized by the clear signal of glowing carbon emitting from one side of the ancient galaxy.

QUALIFYING ALMA’S FINDINGS

“This is the most distant detection ever of this kind of emission from a ‘normal galaxy (sic), seen less than one billion years after the Big Bang,” exclaimed Andrea Ferrara, co-author of these new findings. “It gives us the opportunity to watch the build-up of the first galaxies. For the first time we are seeing early galaxies not merely as tiny blobs, but as objects with internal structure!”

The reason for the above mentioned galaxies’ glowing side is that the normally brighter central clouds are being disrupted by the chaotic environment surrounding freshly born stars. Additionally, the carbon’s glow is actually tracing new, cold gas on its way into the stars from intergalactic space, and then the light is sent back out on its long journey to the ALMA’s dishes.

SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS

Ferrara explains further, “We have been trying to understand the interstellar medium and the formation of the re-ionization sources for many years…[f]inally to be able to test predictions and hypotheses on real data from ALMA is an exciting moment and opens up a new set of questions. This type of observation will clarify many of the thorny problems we have with the formation of the first stars and galaxies in the universe.”

---

Preserve your newly acquired data with Nanoform:

Galaxies 800 Million Years After Big Bang Limned By ALMA