http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2891412/posts
Somebody else might want to post this item to the planetary science section of the forum.
Somebody else might want to post this item to the planetary science section of the forum.
GaryN wrote:Somebody else might want to post this item to the planetary science section of the forum.
No, I think the Mad Ideas forum is just perfect. What nonsense.
I didn't say I BOUGHT the idea
Astronomers have found strong evidence that a massive black hole is being ejected from its host galaxy at a speed of several million miles per hour. New observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory suggest that the black hole collided and merged with another black hole and received a powerful recoil kick from gravitational wave radiation.
"It's hard to believe that a supermassive black hole weighing millions of times the mass of the sun could be moved at all, let alone kicked out of a galaxy at enormous speed," said Francesca Civano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), who led the new study. "But these new data support the idea that gravitational waves -- ripples in the fabric of space first predicted by Albert Einstein but never detected directly -- can exert an extremely powerful force."
Although the ejection of a supermassive black hole from a galaxy by recoil because more gravitational waves are being emitted in one direction than another is likely to be rare, it nevertheless could mean that there are many giant black holes roaming undetected out in the vast spaces between galaxies.
"These black holes would be invisible to us," said co-author Laura Blecha, also of CfA, "because they have consumed all of the gas surrounding them after being thrown out of their home galaxy."
Both of these alternate explanations would require at least one of the supermassive black holes to be very obscured, since only one bright X-ray source is observed. Thus the Chandra data support the idea of a black hole recoiling because of gravitational waves.
GaryN wrote:I didn't say I BOUGHT the idea
I didn't mean to imply that you had, I presumed you'd posted it here because you too thought it was Mad!
303vegas wrote:i think they make this stuff up as they go along...
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