Posted on 02/06/2023 5:12:32 PM PST by entropy12
Billions of light years away, there is a giant ball of hot gas that is brighter than hundreds of billions of suns. It is hard to imagine something so bright. So what is it? Astronomers are not really sure, but they have a couple theories.
They think it may be a very rare type of supernova — called a magnetar — but one so powerful that it pushes the energy limits of physics, or in other words, the most powerful supernova ever seen as of today.
This object is so luminous that astronomers are having a really difficult time finding a way to describe it. “If it really is a magnetar, it's as if nature took everything we know about magnetars and turned it up to 11,” said Krzysztof Stanek, professor of astronomy at Ohio State University and the team's co-principal investigator, comedically implying it is off the charts on a scale of 1 to 10.The object was first spotted by the All Sky Automated Survey of Supernovae (ASAS-SN or “assassin”), which is a small network of telescopes used to detect bright objects in the universe. Although this object is ridiculously bright, it still can’t be seen by the naked eye because it is 3.8 billion light years away.
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.physics-astronomy.com ...
Put that slice of lemon in the largest highball in the universe.
“No. He just figured out that gravity IS, not how it actually works.”
Sure he did. He figured out that gravity is created by mass. All mass in the universe generates a force of attraction to all other mass.
Gee. As a child I wondered where all the matter went when it got sucked into a black hole.
Later, they ‘proved’ that black holes weren’t just the stuff of fantasy (sci-fi)...
...but I’ve never heard a scientist ask the question.
As I understand, we are still testing Einstein’s theory of gravitation to figure out how it actually WORKS.
Not to worry, it’s just a Chinese weather balloon.
” As a child I wondered where all the matter went when it got sucked into a black hole. but I’ve never heard a scientist ask the question.”
It stays there. Black holes are objects of infinite density, so you can throw as much stuff as you want into one and it stays there (except for the very small leak known as Hawking radiation).
And the practical effect on my life?
Zero.
If life gives you lemons make limoncello.
“Einstein’s theory of gravitation to figure out how it actually WORKS.”
No, gravity itself if simply described by Newton’s equations.
Einstein complicates things by creating much more complex environments for those equations to happen in (like blackholes).
It’s like asking a watchmaker if they understand how a watch works. And then asking him what would happen if you put a watch in a microwave. He might not be able to answer that one, but that is because the watchmaker doesn’t understand microwaves not that he doesn’t understand watches.
We have a new threat. Stop galactic warming.
Still a lot of mystery about gravity.
A guy I knew made top-of-the-line gravity meters. He was hired by the Air Force to try to determine if there was such a thing as “negative” gravity which was pushing mass farther away.
Their long-range missiles weren’t tracking properly, in spite of taking into account the varying mass of the earth going across various terrain.
He told me his work was inconclusive. He figured they just didn’t have accurate info on the various land masses. But he also kept an open mind about “anti-gravity” forces.
Um, no.
How does 570 billion times as bright as the sun compare to the combined brightness of all the stars in the Milky Way (other than the sun, of course)? I would guess it’s more than the entire Milky Way galaxy...but I could be wrong.
We need some SPF 1,000,000,000.
Hit it.
Is that what calypso Louie called the mother wheel? I wish he would board it on a one way trip
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