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Utopia Talk / Politics / Is this it? Is the end nigh?
Paramount
Member
Sat Sep 14 14:10:15
Black hole at centre of galaxy is getting hungrier, say scientists

Unseeable and inescapable, black holes already rank among the more sinister phenomena out in the cosmos. So it may come as disconcerting news that the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way appears to be growing hungrier.

Astronomers monitoring the colossal object, called Sagittarius A*, found that in the past year it appears to have consumed nearby matter at an unprecedented rate.

“We have never seen anything like this in the 24 years we have studied the supermassive black hole,” said Andrea Ghez, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a senior author of the research. “It’s usually a pretty quiet, wimpy black hole on a diet. We don’t know what is driving this big feast.”

http://www...etting-hungrier-say-scientists
kargen
Member
Sat Sep 14 15:42:40
It will be our savior and future generations will worship it. There is an asteroid heading right for us and this black hole will eat it.
Hrothgar
Member
Sat Sep 14 19:06:58
If the black hole was close enough to save Earth from an asteroid we'd already be fucked from being that close to a black hole.

If you want to get crazy, then it would be a better argument to claim the galaxy is sentient and, sensing the tiny, but potential danger from a increasingly intelligent race of biological animals in an arm of it's spirals, has decided to eat itself in order to stop them before they eventually create an intergalactic danger to the balance of creation.
hood
Member
Sat Sep 14 20:14:02
"If the black hole was close enough to save Earth from an asteroid we'd already be fucked from being that close to a black hole."

That's just completely untrue. It would depend entirely on the proposed system. For instance, replace any body (except the moon or sun) in the solar system that regularly deflects or captures asteroids. Replace that body with a black hole of equal mass. Tada, no harm to earth.


"Astronomers monitoring the colossal object, called Sagittarius A*, found that in the past year it appears to have consumed nearby matter at an unprecedented rate."

The 2 likely reasons are that something threaded the needle and had a direct impact with the smbh or an orbit finally decayed and it became feeding time. Cool, but not really extraordinary.




and from the article:
"“The big question is whether the black hole is entering a new phase … and the rate of gas falling down the black hole drain has increased for an extended period, or whether we have just seen the fireworks from a few unusual blobs of gas falling in,”"

Yep, exactly as I said.
Paramount
Member
Sun Sep 15 01:29:54
The more a black hole eats, the bigger it gets, right?

So if it continues to eat materia it will eventually devour our planet.

It must mean that if we can’t find a way stop a black hole from eating – it (a black hole) will be the only thing that remains in the universe. Maybe it can eat so much that it burst in a big bang.
hood
Member
Sun Sep 15 01:48:34
"So if it continues to eat materia it will eventually devour our planet."

.... No.

The next closest star is 4 lightyears away. The center of the galaxy is thousands of lightyears away. Even the most massive of black holes have a radius of like 0.0001 lightyears.
McKobb
Member
Sun Sep 15 02:01:23
There appears to be an upper mass limit of black holes of about fifty to one hundred billion times the mass of our sun...says one study.

I'm not sure of the mechanisms involved here.
McKobb
Member
Sun Sep 15 02:30:29
Maybe turn into a white hole? Remember, white holes spit and black holes swallow!
Average Ameriacn
Member
Sun Sep 15 04:54:48
And that's why Trump wants to create a space force, now nobody's laughing anymore, eh?
smart dude
Member
Tue Sep 17 02:58:20
Wow, sensationalist bullshit. Black holes don't get "hungrier." Like the article says, a star near the black hole is getting closer to it. What does that have to do with the "end" here on Earth? Nothing.
smart dude
Member
Tue Sep 17 03:00:39
"The more a black hole eats, the bigger it gets, right?

So if it continues to eat materia it will eventually devour our planet."

No. Just, no. Take a remedial physics class ffs. "Eating" material does nothing to increase the mass of the system. Go back to obsessing about the U.S. That is your specialty.
hood
Member
Tue Sep 17 07:34:09
^ depends entirely on how you define the system. If you're only observing everything within the event horizon, eating material most definitely increases mass and therefore radius.

But at the scale of a supermassive, these changes are practically immeasurable. Even 50 solar masses is nothing compared to 1 million or 1 billion.
smart dude
Member
Tue Sep 17 10:37:52
"depends entirely on how you define the system."

the system of the black hole and the object it is eating.
hood
Member
Tue Sep 17 10:44:48
Obviously. But I wouldn't expect the dunce who created the thread to be capable of comprehending that.
Seb
Member
Tue Sep 17 10:55:09
Hood:

Schwartzchild radius goes as about 3 km per solar mass. So yeah, it won't change much, but I always found it interesting there's a linear relationship.

Sagittarius A* supermassive black hole has a radius less than 1/10th the earth's orbit around the sun.


Paramount
Member
Tue Sep 17 10:57:59
http://chandra.harvard.edu/blackhole/

”Do black holes grow when matter falls into them? Yes, the mass of the black hole increases by the amount of mass that was captured”


Looks like I was correct. Black holes do grow.


”Are there limits to black hole growth? Theoretically, black holes can grow without limit.”

Owned.
Sam Adams
Member
Wed Sep 18 12:49:20
Bernie sanders says that he will stop this if you allow him to increase your taxes.
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