Jason

Two supermassive black holes have been found to be spiraling toward a merger, astronomers said today

Mergers between black holes are thought to be one way they grow. A handful of similar setups have been observed in which black holes appear inevitably on a merger course. This pair, at the center of a galaxy cluster called Abell 400, was known to be close but their fate hadn't been determined.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/200604...esboundtomerge

40sondacurb

The very nature of black holes prevent you from seeing them so this is just kind of a guess.

blackduck30

Black Hole

Listen to Karl talk about Black Hole
(You will need Real Audio which you can download for free)

http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/moments/s758330.htm

Over the last 30 years, the two words “Black Hole” have come to have a new meaning, quite different from their original British Empire reference a few centuries ago, as in The Black Hole of Calcutta (a tiny dark airless jail). A Black Hole is some kind of really weird star, not in our Solar System but somewhere out there in the Universe, that has such an intense gravitational field that not even light can escape. The idea of the Black Hole has so tweaked the public imagination that there have even been movies made about Black Holes. And in the common language, Black Hole has eclipsed Bottomless Pit as something that takes, takes, takes - and never gives anything out. The strange thing is that the evidence for them has always been slightly fuzzy - and this has hindered Black Holes from escaping from the realm of Science Fiction. But just recently, we’ve got much better proof that Black Holes really exist.

Back in the 1960s, the British mathematician, Sir Roger Penrose, mathematically worked out many of the features of Black Holes. He teamed up with Stephen Hawking, and by 1969 they proved that the stuff inside a Black Hole has a volume of zero and an infinite density.

Now the trouble with proving that Black Holes exist is they do not emit light - which means that you cannot see them directly.

The most common method so far to find a Black Hole has been to look at the stuff that’s being swallowed by the Black Hole. Sure, it will eventually end up inside the Black Hole, but before it falls in, it gives off a very characteristic pattern of X-rays. These special X-rays have been seen coming out of the centre of most galaxies, so most astronomers believe that virtually every galaxy has a Black Hole at its centre. But there has always been the possibility that something else is giving off those special X-rays.

Just recently, some scientists used a second, quite different, method to almost certainly prove that a Black Hole does exist at the centre of our galaxy - about 30,000 light-years away from us. The scientists were Rainer Schödel from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching in Germany, and his co-workers in Germany, France, Israel and the U.S. The method they used involved Kepler’s Laws, that were discovered some 400 years ago.

Johannes Kepler lived from 1571 to 1630. He discovered the three major laws that govern the movements of the planets in our Solar System around the Sun, or of any object around another object. The first law is that the planets move in an elliptical, or egg-shaped, orbit. The second law says that a line drawn between the Sun and any of the planets will sweep out an equal area in equal time. And the third law says that there is a special relationship between the square of the time that the planet takes to go around the Sun, and the cube of its radius.

Put into plain English, these laws mean that Mercury (which is the closest planet to the Sun) will zip around in just 88 days. It has to move so fast, so as to counteract the tremendously close gravity of the Sun.

But the most distant planet from the Sun, Pluto, is a long way out. It takes sunlight 5 hours to get there, so we say that it’s 5 light-hours away from the Sun. The gravity of the Sun is really weak out there, which means that Pluto takes a nice leisurely 248 years to orbit the Sun. And of course if something was a lot further out, say 17 light-hours out from the Sun, it would take a lot longer again - because the gravity of the Sun would be so weak.

Schödel and his colleagues looked at a star that was going around a mysterious object at the centre of our galaxy. The astronomers called this object Sagittarius A* - and they think that it’s a Black Hole. This object gives out the sort of X-ray radiation we’d expect from a Black Hole. They followed this star that was orbiting Sagittarius A* for 10 years, and worked out that it came as close as 17 light-hours to Sagittarius A*.

But did it take thousands of years to do an orbit? No, it took only 15 years.

The reason that it’s moving so rapidly is because it’s trying to avoid being gravitationally sucked in by something that weighs 3.7 million times the mass of our Sun.

Just about the only object that could weigh so much and be very small is a Black Hole. So now we are pretty darn sure that Black Holes do exist.

So how long will it be before we can harness all that sucking power, to run our toasters or vacuum cleaners?

DumberDrummer

There are no such things as black holes, only space aliens emitting x-rays.

Its true!!

40sondacurb

Wrong! they're vortexes where the evil Lord Xenu traps the thetons of the galaxy.

(for those who don't get it: http://www.antisectes.net/42xenub-eng.pdf what they actually believe)

DumberDrummer

are you sure?

Maybe we should send some airplanes out to check....

toxict3arz

uhhh hello~~ airplanes cant go up that high

maybe a helicopter


and black holes are real by the way

black hole is created ... when a star blows up blah blah and it like sucks in a bunch of stuff .. and wha~la~ black hole ..

thats what i heard

ebackhus

Hail Xenu!!

DumberDrummer

airplanes=scientology reference... I know they can't go that high.

40sondacurb

Sue the unbeliever!

bry623

I showed this to my brother and he thought it sounded like the title of an adult film.

40sondacurb

That is wrong on too amny levels to point out .