Posted on 09/22/2015 9:34:46 AM PDT by LibWhacker
The apocalypse is still on, apparently — at least in a galaxy about 3.5 billion light-years from here.
Last winter, a team of Caltech astronomers reported that two supermassive black holes appeared to be spiraling together toward a cataclysmic collision that could bring down the curtains in that galaxy.
The evidence was a rhythmic flickering from the galaxy’s nucleus, a quasar known as PG 1302-102, which Matthew Graham and his colleagues interpreted as the fatal mating dance of a pair of black holes with a total mass of more than a billion suns. Their merger, the astronomers calculated, could release as much energy as 100 million supernova explosions, mostly in the form of violent ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves that would blow the stars out of that hapless galaxy like leaves off a roof.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I knew it!!!
Horton DID hear a Who!!!!!
I told you all this climate change was serious
It will end with the discontinuation of tax money grants to "scientists" who make up or embellish scary, entertaining things with which to regale us. Like AGW/CO2.
Advanced LIGO just came on-line for science operation four days ago, on 18 September 2015.
Chuck Norris burps Black Holes so they are like a popcorn fart in a whirlwind.
I don’t think they know anything about the laws of physics inside black holes. Could our universe be a black hole? I was reading something about that a few weeks ago and I thought the best argument against it was that not only do we observe our universe expanding, we see it expanding faster and faster in time.
It doesn’t seem like we could possibly observe that situation if we were inside a black hole where presumably everything, including space, is rushing inward toward the center.
Coming soon: The War of Worldcraft!
Squishes them to nothingness?
Always fun to look at the enormity and strangeness of our universe.
Thanks for posting.
The most important question... how can we blame this on global warming?
Only from your frame of reference.
Kee-rect. Already happened in real-time (whatever that means) but won’t be detectable here for-—ah-— a good long while.
That prospect is nothing compared to what will happen when our universe bumps into another one.
If the combined mass is greater than a billion suns, why is the energy only worth 100 million supernovae? Is only 1 mass in 10 gonna blow?
...in a galaxy far, far away.
>DC is already a black hole.<
.
That is racist
That reason is going to be buried in the equations. Remember, this isn’t the explosion of a billion suns, it’s the merger of two black holes having the mass of a billion suns. And the resulting gravitational hiccup will have the energy of 100 million supernovae. Other than that, I can’t tell you much, not knowing the mathematics.
...caused by global warming.../s
Interesting that a significant percentage of the total mass involved will be lost to producing a gravitational wave.
All my mass could be converted to a gravitational wave and they probably couldn’t detect it even if it happened right next to the LIGO detector (which is a total, perhaps very erroneous, guess on my part!).
OTOH, all my mass could be instantly converted to EM radiation via some nuclear process and, OMG, would they ever be able to detect it, and detect it far, far away... Makes you go, “Hmmm...”
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