galaxy news: Monster

‏إظهار الرسائل ذات التسميات Monster. إظهار كافة الرسائل

الأحد، 26 أغسطس 2012

Monster Black Holes of the Early Universe --"Did They Form Inside Galaxies or Create Them?"

Monster Black Holes of the Early Universe --"Did They Form Inside Galaxies or Create Them?"
Monster Black Holes of the Early Universe --"Did They Form Inside Galaxies or Create Them?"The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel: Sci, Space, TechFollow the Daily Galaxy Add Daily Galaxy to igoogle page

« Phobos -- "Mars' Mystery Moon May Harbor Proof of Ancient Life" |Main| Did the Universe Begin with a Big Bang or Big Chill? "It Was More Like Water Freezing into Ice" Says New Theory »

August 21, 2012 Monster Black Holes of the Early Universe --"Did They Form Inside Galaxies or Create Them?"

6a00d8341bf7f753ef016768fa35af970b-500wi

Did monster black holes pull the first galaxies together, or were they born inside those galaxies? A new analysis of the gravitational ripples from colliding black holes led by Ioannis Kamaretsos of the University of Cardiff could reveal the answer by helping astronomers reconstruct a crash rather than just surveying its aftermath.

According to current theories, Most large galaxies harbor supermassive black holes at their core. But When these galaxies collide and their black holes merge into one massive object, they yield no information about the original black holes.

So astronomers at Cardiff have been trying to look for gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are ripples in space and time, which were predicted by Einstein almost 100 years ago, but have not yet been directly detected. Gravitational waves are generated by accelerating masses, such as orbiting black holes, similar to the way accelerating electrical charges emit electromagnetic waves, like light, infra-red and radio waves -- with the important difference that gravitational waves are far weaker. For this reason it is electromagnetic waves that have told us everything we have learnt about the cosmos since ancient times.

According to Dr Mark Hannam from the Cardiff School of Physics and Astronomy, "If we could also detect gravitational waves, that would push open a new window on the universe, and tell us about its dark side".General relativity predicts that colliding black holes should emit such ripples in the fabric of space-time, including a wave called the ringdown that contains information about the final black hole's mass and spin. Computer simulations led by Kamaretsos show that the ringdown can also tell us the masses and spins of the two original black holes.

The team of researchers is using more than 1900 computer processors for one year to solve the equations of Einstein's general theory of relativity, to describe what happens when two black holes collide. The ultimate goal of the simulations is the direct observation of black-hole collisions through the gravitational-wave signals that they emit.

Black-hole

The research team comprises more than 20 physicists working at Cardiff, the Universities of Jena, Vienna, and the Balearic Islands, the Albert Einstein Institute in Potsdam, and the California Institute of Technology. Solving Einstein's equations on supercomputers to accurately describe black holes became possible only after a series of breakthroughs in 2005, and the mostly young researchers are excited to be part of a scientific revolution.

"The detectors are pushing against the limits of current technology, and now we will help them with simulations that are at the cutting edge of computing power," says Dr Hannam.

Some current theories say the gravity of the black holes of the early universe pulled matter together to form the first galaxies. It remains a mystery. however, if the earliest black holes were massive enough to do this.

The largest known black hole exists at the center of the super giant elliptical galaxy M87 in cluster Virgo fifty million light-years away is the most massive black hole for which a precise mass has been measured -6.6 billion solar masses. Orbiting the galaxy is an abnormally large population of about 12,000 globular clusters, compared to 150-200 globular clusters orbiting the Milky Way.

In 2011, using the Frederick C. Gillett Gemini Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, a team of astronomers calculated the black hole’s mass (shown at top of page), which is vastly larger than the black hole in the center of the Milky Way, which is about 4 million solar masses. The black hole’s event horizon, 20 billion km across “could swallow our solar system whole.”

The Daily Galaxy via arxiv.org/abs/1207.0399, http://www.astro.cf.ac.uk/newsandevents/?page=news_detail&news=0102, and newscientist.com

Image credit: Collision of two black holes. M. Thierfelder and B. Bruegmann, FSU Jena and Chandra X-Ray Space Observatory

Posted at 08:45 AM | Permalink

Comments

In my opinion, I would have to say black holes created galaxies. I've been thinking blackholes are other universes in a different realm. And universes are life, and these blackholes have to happen first, in order to insure their survival. Then our type of primative life can occur after other universes are started. Just my opinion though.

Posted by:Justin |August 22, 2012 at 10:05 AM

This is a very interesting research paper. If gravity waves are detected someday, then it would open up new avenues in Physics. Who knows, may be we would be building Gravity Wave Telescopes - which would be directly looking into the heart of these monstrous black holes. Exciting Physics.

Posted by:GodParitcle |August 24, 2012 at 08:17 AM

الجمعة، 10 أغسطس 2012

Mystery of 'Monster Stars' of the Large Magellanic Cloud: Solved

Mystery of 'Monster Stars' of the Large Magellanic Cloud: Solved
Mystery of 'Monster Stars' of the Large Magellanic Cloud: SolvedThe Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel: Sci, Space, TechFollow the Daily Galaxy Add Daily Galaxy to igoogle page

« Will Mars be the 'Rosetta Stone' in the Search for Life in the Universe? |Main| Curiosity Fires Up the "Science Lab" --Begins Its Search for Life at Gale Crater »

August 07, 2012 Mystery of 'Monster Stars' of the Large Magellanic Cloud: Solved

Opo9404b

In 2010 scientists discovered four 'monster' sized stars, with the heaviest more than 300 times as massive as our Sun, or twice as much as the currently accepted limit of 150 solar masses. . Despite their incredible luminosity, these exotic objects, located in the giant star cluster R136 in the nearby galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud; have oddly so far been found nowhere else. Now a group of astronomers at the University of Bonn have a new explanation: the ultramassive stars were created from the merger of lighter stars in tight binary systems.

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), at a distance of 160000 light years, is the third nearest satellite of the Milky Way galaxy we live in and contains around 10 billion stars. The LMC has many star forming regions, with by far the most active being the 1000 light year diameter 'Tarantula Nebula' where the four supermassive stars are found. This cloud of gas and dust is a highly fertile breeding ground of stars in the LMC also known as the "30 Doradus" (30 Dor) complex.

Near the center of 30 Dor is R136, by far the brightest stellar nursery not just in the LMC but in the entire 'Local Group' of more than 50 galaxies (including our own) and the site of the perplexing ultramassive stars. Until the discovery of these objects in 2010, observations of the Milky Way and other galaxies suggested that the upper limit for stars formed in the present day universe was about 150 times the mass of the Sun. This value represented a universal limit and appeared to apply wherever stars formed.

"Not only the upper mass limit but the whole mass ingredient of any newborn assembly of stars appears identical irrespective of the stellar birthplace", says Pavel Kroupa of the University of Bonn, a co-author on the new paper. "The star birth process seems to be universal".

The newly discovered four ultrabright ultramassive stars in R136 are quite an exception to this widely accepted limit. Does their discovery mean that the star birth in the 30 Dor region is happening in a very different way from elsewhere in the universe? If so, it would challenge the universal nature of the process of star formation, a fundamental premise of modern astronomy.

The Bonn group, also including lead investigator Dr Sambaran Banerjee and team member Seungkyung Oh, modelled the interactions between stars in a R136-like cluster. Their computer simulation assembled the model cluster star by star, so as to resemble the real cluster as closely as possible, creating a cluster of more than 170,000 stars packed closely together. At the outset Seungkyung ensured that the stars were all of a normal mass and were distributed in the way expected.

To compute how even this relatively basic system changes over time, the model had to solve 510,000 equations many times over. The simulation is complicated by the effect of the nuclear reactions and hence energy released by each star and what happens when two stars happen to collide, a frequent event in such a crowded environment.

These highly intensive, star by star calculations are known as 'direct N-body simulations' and are the most reliable and accurate way to model clusters of stars. The Bonn researchers used the N-body integration code "NBODY6", developed primarily by Sverre Aarseth of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge and took advantage of the unprecedented hardware acceleration of video-gaming cards installed in otherwise ordinary workstations to fast forward their calculations.

"With all these ingredients, our R136 models are the most difficult and intensive N-body calculations ever made", say Pavel and Seungkyung. "Once these calculations were done, it quickly became clear that the ultramassive stars are no mystery", adds Sambaran. "They start appearing very early in the life of the cluster. With so many massive stars in tight binary pairs, themselves packed closely together, there are frequent random encounters, some of which result in collisions where two stars coalesce into heavier objects. The resulting stars can then quite easily end up being as ultramassive as those seen in R136.

"Imagine two bulky stars closely circling each other but where the duo gets pulled apart by the gravitational attraction from their neighbouring stars. If their initially circular orbit is stretched enough, then the stars crash into each other as they pass and make a single ultramassive star", Sambaran explains.

"Although extremely complicated physics is involved when two very massive stars collide, we still find it quite convincing that this explains the monster stars seen in the Tarantula", says Banerjee. * "This helps us relax", concludes Kroupa, "Because the collisions mean that the ultramassive stars are a lot easier to explain. The universality of star formation prevails after all."

For more information a preprint of this paper can be downloaded from arxiv.org/abs/1208.0826 Journal reference: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The image below shows left to right the Tarantula nebula and the R136 cluster within it. The most extreme of these stars was found in the cluster R136. Named R136a1, it is found to have a current mass of 265 times that of the Sun.

Astronomersc

The Daily Galaxy via Royal Astronomical Society

Image credit: European Southern Observatory

Posted at 02:00 PM | Permalink

Comments

There is no observable evidence for colliding stars, and scientists have resorted to desperation to collaborate with the outdated phony big-bang baby early universe model. Colliding stars would produce supernova energy scale outbursts easily detectable if it was true. Hydrogen and helium,have supersolid and superliquid superstate transitions, that superconduct electricity and explain the sun's enormous magnetic fields and heliosphere current sheath. Birkeland current filaments get magnetic twisted knots in spiral galaxy arm filaments where stars commonly form. The charge-mass analog for plasma stars entirely confuses gravity star models, producing wrong stupid ideas like this interpretation.
Holographicgalaxy.blogspot.com

Posted by:Holo |August 08, 2012 at 12:05 PM

Holo

I am thinking if you was right, we would see at the very least a few scattered random giant stars across the skys instead of all to a certain size and then 4 super giants close together. Im not saying magnetics dont play a part but it looks like you didnt even read the article before breaking out the "dead big bang" wagon. And who knows, maybe the gravity and electric/magnetic forces held all normal outburst to a almost impossible quick assimilation where any super/nova type outburst were swallowed in the process.
The ability to think "anything is possible" stops us from missing things thats right there to be seen but we dont because we just dont accept it might be possible.

Posted by:smartypants |August 08, 2012 at 03:06 PM