I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Black hole quasar tsunamis moving at 46 million miles per hour
- Reference: 1584779406
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/21/quasar_tsunamis/
- Source link:
“No other phenomena carries more mechanical energy,” [1]said Nahum Arav, first author of a study into the winds, and a physics professor at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in the US.
“The amount of mechanical energy that these outflows carry is up to several hundreds of times higher than the luminosity of the entire Milky Way galaxy."
Move over, gamma-ray bursts, which are some of the most energetic events recorded in the universe: quasar tsunamis generate more energy in the long run, Arav explained. “Over the lifetime of ten million years, these outflows produce a million times more energy than a gamma-ray burst."
Quasars are extremely bright distant objects embedded deep within giant galaxies. As supermassive black holes gobble gas, the in-falling matter is compressed into a disk. This swirling structure is heated by frictional forces and it emits intense electromagnetic radiation.
The subsequent radiation pressure pushes matter away from the galaxy’s center and drives winds that accelerate to velocities tens of millions of miles per hour. The team of researchers spotted one outflow that sped up from about 43 million miles per hour to 46 million miles per hour over three years. They reckon it’ll only get faster over time.
The shock fronts from the ripples reach scorching temperatures as the wind hurls into the surrounding gas causing it to emit X-ray radiation that will gradually fade into visible and infrared light. The glow would light up the galaxy in different spots. "You'd get a huge light show – like Christmas trees all over the galaxy," said Arav.
Quasar tsunamis don’t just put on glittering light displays in space: they may explain longstanding cosmic mysteries such as why massive galaxies are so rare, and the strange link between the mass of a black hole in a galaxy and the mass contained in the galaxy. It’s possible that their destructive nature cuts off star formation, wiping out the resources needed to sustain a galaxy.
The scientists discovered the phenomenon while studying 13 quasar winds: they were able to measure the speed of the outflows using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The spectrograph instrument on-board measures the chemical signatures of gas molecules, and since the quasar wind accelerates the molecules, there is a doppler shift in the observations. That shift allows them to estimate the speed of these quasar tsunamis.
"Hubble's ultraviolet observations allow us to follow the whole range of energy output from quasars, from cooler gas to the extremely hot, highly ionized gas in the more massive winds," said Gerard Kriss, co-author of the paper and a boffin at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland.
"These were previously only visible with much more difficult X-ray observations. Such powerful outflows may yield new insights into the link between the growth of a central supermassive black hole and the development of its entire host galaxy." ®
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/quasar-tsunamis-rip-across-galaxies
Re: Has anyone told GoSafe?
Did you have Blue lights on?
No, then the law applies to EVERYONE.
Btw people that moan, do the maths on how much time you save doing 35 in a 30, then allow for normal start stop and slowing traffic, and you'll save ooooo couple of seconds?
And yes I have been done for speeding, but I'm grown up enough to admit I was at fault.
Oh ask the A&E department if they are happy about receiving a car accident victim because you "needed" to get somewhere 30 seconds earlier.
OH and BTW, as far as I'm aware, all speeding tickets are retrospective. Luckily AI hasn't started fining people who may speed....yet.
Re: Has anyone told GoSafe?
I used to drive 30 miles or so to work and some of it involved towns with lots of roundabouts. The XR3i used to get me into work in pretty much the same time as the VW camper - thought it was a lot more fun with the roof down and the straight through exhaust spitting like an angry wasp. Once I worked out driving like a lunatic didnt get me there any faster I analysed the situation.
Basically as IGotOut pointed out its largely other traffic that limits your time - doing 400 yds 10% faster normally means you just spend longer queueing at the junction.
But more importantly at speed you are not as able to judge the traffic ahead. The camper wouldnt do anything in a hurry and as a result you had the spare brain power to work out the traffic ahead - on low roundabouts you could even see traffic on the far side of it and many I time I could avoid braking on the approach and actually fly past the BMW that had overtaken me at speed but couldn't anticipate the gap in flow on the roundabout that I could. I was overtaken by the same car 6 times when driving across Chelmsford as a result.
But most important of all is idiot speeders slow the overall traffic down for everyone - they introduce turbulence into otherwise laminar traffic flow and fuck it up for everyone. That one idiot driving too fast down the outside lane of the motorway to be able to read the signs and cuts everyone up desperately trying to get to their turning leaves ripples in the traffic flow for hours afterwards.
Mindboggingly fast
This article reminded me of one of my favourite bits of Douglas Adams' writing: "light, which travels so fast that it takes most races thousands of years to realize that it travels at all" - 46 million mph is incomprehensibly fast, yet apparently works out to roughly 6.8% of c - neither of my neurons can process that.
Quasar tsunamis ...
Aside from being an awesome band name, "Quasar Tsunamis" is definitely the sort of thing that [1]Ming the Merciless would have on his console.
Ming: "Klytus, I'm bored. What plaything can you offer me today?"
Klytus: "An obscure body in the S-K system, Your Majesty. The inhabitants refer to it as the planet Earth".
RIP Max von Sydow
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Gordon_(film)
Re: Quasar tsunamis ...
Sampled into a great [1]Orb track
[1] https://youtu.be/VfnxPQ0vnIA?t=22
"They reckon it’ll only get faster over time"
How does that work ?
Unless I missed something in science class, in space you need some form of propulsion to go faster. This quasar tsunami (as awesome as it is named) is just gas and particles hurtling across a galaxy and encountering other gas and particles.
Those are not conditions that are favorable to acceleration.
Has anyone told GoSafe?
There could be a new cash cow revenue stream here.
(Who knew, it was morally repugnant to regressively fine key workers for doing 35mph in a 30, while on duty, caring for the sick).