Mind blowing.....HUGE black holes.....

yes mac.....blows me away......

for me... life on other planets somewhere is a certainty......there are so many planets going round so many stars that it beggars belief...and mathematics...that there isnt a place that has been stable enough for long enough to develop intelligent life.....even if not exactly like our own....

cant prove it of course but this is my gut feeling.

I agree entirely egner, biggest certainty since sliced bread!

I assume that you have heard of Frank Drake`s equation, but if not check this out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dilKJ6uLCc8

Isn't Frank Drake the guy who sailed around THIS world?

Imagine if many, many planets are found with liquid water, the right climate and atmosphere etc, and absolutely no life is exists. Not even a single cell. And we try to understand it is not inevitable that life will exist just because all the elements are perfect. It will spin our science on its head as we begin to look for our almighty creator...heavy shitt!!

Ummmm - no.

no doubt there would be bacteris sent to live on the planets and left for like millions of years -who knows ?  dinosaurs may even make a comeback there

See we still dont really know what came first, on Earth.

The virus or the host?

Take the Milky Way galaxy for example, our home, if one could travel at the speed of light, 186,000 per second, it would take 100,000 Earth years to go from one end to other

It would take no time at all, if that speed were possible. Close, but under c and you can make it any time you wish. Seeing as we are talking about hypothetical and impossible numbers:

99.99% the speed of light gives you 1414.32 years. 100,010 years would pass on Earth [ignoring accelerations].

the event horizon is the actual circumference of the Black Hole, so it`s a little bit bigger than a dustbin lid

Aye. Towards the business end though it’ll be the size of a dustbin somewhere and at the business end it’ll be so small it has no size, which is thought provoking when you realise what has gone into it.

At the very big or the very small, the universe is breathtaking.

Imagine if many, many planets are found with liquid water, the right climate and atmosphere etc, and absolutely no life is exists. Not even a single cell. And we try to understand it is not inevitable that life will exist just because all the elements are perfect. It will spin our science on its head as we begin to look for our almighty creator...heavy shitt!!

It’s possible that there’s nothing out there (I tend to agree it’s not likely) but if it is true, imagine - all that universe and there’s just us, watching Coronation Street and getting uptight about someone that’s parked in ‘our’ space.

If the universe is that vast and there’s just us, it may be that the creator has lost us and that’s why we don’t hear from him - perhaps he forgot where he left us. He won’t be that impressed when he turns up and finds us in, in our dressing gowns, watching daytime TV on the sofa and farting occasionally.

he shouldnt have dropped us down back of his sofa while lifting a cheek to fart then

According to string theorist's there could be 500 to the power of 10 universes.
Our universe is made up of approximately only 125 to the power of 10 atoms(not counting dark matter and dark energy)
mind blowing

And we might be the only brains on this brane.

I wonder if we'll ever be able to say that string theory is anything more than a philosophy given the practical limitations of ever proving it?

themightymac
I agree entirely egner, biggest certainty since sliced bread!

I assume that you have heard of Frank Drake`s equation, but if not check this out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dilKJ6uLCc8





Drakes equation has been debated and the consensus is that it's not very good really.  The numbers picked are too arbitrary and not enough factors are considered.

I think they might have designed a more advanced equation now.

Drakes equation might as well be

total guess * random number / wild speculation

swap the multiplication and division symbols and I think that was his equation, brenda.

theres more stars up there than grains of sand on the earth - get yer head round that one !

RLKingPunter     08 Dec 11 01:36 
theres more stars up there than grains of sand on the earth - get yer head round that one !

Heard that sh1te when I was 12, how can they prove it and who has counted?

Astronomers love big numbers and, yes, it is fascinating and mind blowing stuff.

I like the one about grains of sand and I had people on here, and elsewhere, trying to guess how many buckets/egg cups full would equal the number of stars.

Typical answers were 3/4 of a bucket plus 4 egg cups full.

That sounds like plenty to most folks!

The other big number, that is hard to comprehend, is that if it were possible for a passenger jet to fly none stop, it would take 1,100 years to fly, just one time, around the largest known star!

And talking about astronomers liking big numbers, Patrick Moore once came out with the classic
"500 thousand millionths of a......."!

I've forgotten to what he was referring but I ask you, what's wrong with saying "half of"?

given how much space is in space, it must be less than 1.01 there is life out there of some sort.

we should hope that whatever they are, they don't visit earth.

america will first try to east them, when that fails they will try to shag them, and finally after 2 failures, they will do what they do best, they will try to destroy them.

and as they found us, they are obviously far more technically advanced than we are.

So.....to shorten the obvious inter-galactic war, bend over and kiss your arse goodbye when they land.

'eat' not 'east'

I get just over 5000 times the radius of Pluto's orbit for the size.

Of course, we could be inside a really big black hole already and not know it...

boggle 07 Dec 11 17:13

Hold on ... ermm ... calm down, calm down their la - ten billion times the mass of the Sun. At least that's what it said on the website this morning, not 10 billion times bigger which is ... big.

The radius is proportional to the mass, so that's 10bn times bigger than the equivalent hole that the mass of the sun would form.  That's 3km, so the big hole is 30bn km in radius.  If you now decide "big" is volume, then you're talking the cube of that...

they are obviously far more technically advanced than we are.
That's a discussion in itself. Look at conflicts on earth, the furthest travellers usually have the better technology and win the day. But there are many examples where the technologically backward civilisation, with home advantage, springs a surprise. A bit like Newcastle beating Gloucester in last weeks Aviva premiership. Or perhaps the first serious attempts on the South Pole and back which ended as follows using chess notation:
South Pole 1/2:1/2 Scott
South Pole 0:1 Amundsen
South Pole 1:0 Scott

The conquistadors versus the Americas was a massive and easy win for the travellers of course and examples like that are in the majority, but it's not always one-sided.
I'd go 1.3 we have to kiss our arses goodbye in the twomatchpoints scenario.

Thought this was going to be another Fatima Whitbread thread.

boggle
08 Dec 11 00:54
the event horizon is the actual circumference of the Black Hole, so it`s a little bit bigger than a dustbin lid

Aye. Towards the business end though it’ll be the size of a dustbin somewhere and at the business end it’ll be so small it has no size, which is thought provoking when you realise what has gone into it.

The event Horizon is it's gravitational pull from which light can't escape isn't it? I would imagine the Event Horizon of a Black Hole with 10 Billion times the mass of the Sun to exert a pull of at least a few billion miles - maybe a lot more

,A pull sufficient, that is, to not let light (or anything else) escape

...bet Chompy could escape...

Don't you frivolize my profound thinking, fella

sorry

The 70's classic "Powers of Ten" illustrates the scale of the very big and very small:
.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

Sky at night, then horizon about stars bbc4

now!

Brendan - I've sent you a message re the other thread you're on.

in 100 years from now, i think they will know very little more about black holes than today.  they are hardly likely to visit any, or send probes etc, as they are so far away,  telescopes can hardly be improved much more than whats available today.

so who thinks im way off?

truly fascinating though

I think they will be able to send probes into black holes in the future but not in our time. There are so many in each galaxy and you`d be surprised how many are in our own back yard. The thing that fascinates me is that it has been discovered that there is a super massive black hole at the centre of every known galaxy. IMO, this is not mere coincidence and is the key to the truth about the Universe. The question is WHY? I actually think that our Universe is actually contained within a super monster massive black hole, but then again, maybe I`m nuts.

I'm not too sure about the prospect of probes being sent into black holes. The closest Black Hole is 1600 light years away

they call them spiral galaxies, i think, heard the phrase anyway,  black hole exerting a force at the centre and like a plughole in your sink,  sucking stuff into the center,  eventually we get sucked into it? 

for some reason i favour the billions of different universes, how could one even begin to prove this is true,  imagine if it was, makes the question of life other than on earth a ridiculous numbers game

very good post snorki. makes the mind boggle.

Heres a question. assuming sometime in the distant future it is possible to send a probe into a black hole, would it be possible for it to send radio signals back to mother earth if not even light can escape from a black hole?

themightymac

No, it's not possible. I think I'm right in saying that light rays and radio signals are both forms of electro magnetic radiation, but at different ends of the spectrum.

Plus, any probe would get crushed to a dot by the gravitational force of a black hole.

I don't think it's by any means 'certain' that life exists elsewhere other than earth in our universe. It's a possibility of course, but it's also possible that we're all alone. It depends on the probability of all the factors that make life happen coming together.

The odds could be higher than the number of atoms in the universe, never mind the number of planets, in which case we would almost certainly be alone in the universe.

nice post get me a drink.

I suppose the odds on life evolving on another planet are astronomical (pardon the pun) but surely with so many stars and planets and possibly an infinite number of Universes, those odds must have tumbled. IMO, it`s a certainty that there are other forms of life, however primitive, on millions of planets throughout the Universe.

If there isn`t and life on Earth is so special and the Universe was created by God, the big question is, why did he also create so many lifeless worlds? Just to confuse us and test one`s faith?

I've had a little think about it and I think there's a good chance that there is life throughout the universe, simply because there must be so many earth like planets out there because the same processes that created the earth have been repeated ad nausium throughout the galaxy and wider universe.

However, if we are indeed alone, this doesn't mean we were necessarily created by God, it just means that we got very very lucky.

If God does exist, I think we are like a micro chasm of what he is, in a fractal like way.

I also think the universe was a black hole once that sucked in one too many particles and just exploded.

possible getmeadrink - perhaps you`ve solved the mystery of the big bang.

The event Horizon is it's gravitational pull from which light can't escape isn't it? I would imagine the Event Horizon of a Black Hole with 10 Billion times the mass of the Sun to exert a pull of at least a few billion miles - maybe a lot more

Yes it is a boundary inside of which nothing can escape from or be known about. I’m going to stop making flippant remarks about black holes and dustbins. Whatever way you look at it, 10 billion solar masses is big. I’m not sure it is 5000 times the radius of the orbit of Pluto though, I think it is less than 6, might be wrong though.

I just thought it was funny that the BBC had apparently switched from ‘mass’ to ‘size’, which gives you a misleading mental picture if you are not aware of the difference, as many of the general public wouldn’t be, admittedly it hardly matters in the scheme of things.

I’m not sure what you mean by a pull sufficient not to let any light out - you use the word ‘pull’ twice. If you mean outside the event horizon, then light will be travelling at c (as always) but will be greatly red-shifted as the field stretches its wavelength.

Gravity is a weak force. The attraction falls off quickly as with any mass so that if, say, a spacecraft were to go by it would be subject to whatever strength of gravity, but if it moved twice as far away, it would only be subject to a quarter the pull previously. I think this is why stars don’t cascade into black holes like you’d imagine they would, or the Mercury into the Sun.

As for being in a black hole ourselves, well we are moving towards ‘something’ along with all(?) other visible galaxies, aren’t we? (the Great Attractor, the Shapely Supercluster) so it's possible.

Snorki
09 Dec 11 00:31
telescopes can hardly be improved much more than whats available today.



Woah woah WOAH! Crazy statement.

Telescope technology will continue to grow just like most other technologies and 100, 1000, 10,000 years from now will be almost unrecognisable from today's seemingly pathetic instruments.

Their development will continue to follow a similar (if not quite as rapid) development as described by Moore's Law.

ÖÐÎÄÂÛ̳
09 Dec 11 00:45 Joined: 08 May 08 | Topic/replies: 4,337 | Blogger: ÖÐÎÄÂÛ̳'s blog
I'm not too sure about the prospect of probes being sent into black holes. The closest Black Hole is 1600 light years away


This made me titter. I think you'll find that this has been going on for years in the Nairobi Haemorroid clinic.

is it rue that no one really knows what goes on inside a black hole beacause the currently accepted laws of physics can no longer be applied...

(and quite obviously nothing can get in there and sent data back to verify things)...

if so perhaps each black hole is a gateway to a new universe...!!!!..

perhap the mechanics of the black hole are such that it can rip apart the fabric of space and time and at the black holes deepest recess a new universe in formed....

and that this what the "big bang" actually was......nothing but the stored energy of a black hole in some other universe causing our own universe to be born!!!!

if it takes a female and a male to make a human being could one of the guys on this very intresting thread please inform me how the first male and/or female ever came about please and also how did they know what to do to make life. Thanks in advance.

Darwin's theory of evolution seems right to me. All living things reproduce and evolve. What came first chicken or egg? well it has to be the egg eggs were around long before chickens. There are egg laying creatures and live bearing creatures, live bearers like humans keep the eggs inside.
OK so much for that, going back to the original subject. If the things we see with telescopes are billions of light years away, what we see has taken billions of years to get here. We are looking at things as they were billions of years ago. How do we know what they are like now. Perhaps its all an illusion.

Read what appeared to be an authoritative book many years ago that debunked the big bang theory.
Something about super clusters(galaxies)needing way more than 14.5 Billion years to realign
I would love to re-visit but can't remember the title.Help would be appreciated.

Angry Monkey
09 Dec 11 09:14
Joined:
08 Feb 09
| Topic/replies: 118 | Blogger: Angry Monkey's blog
Snorki
09 Dec 11 00:31
telescopes can hardly be improved much more than whats available today.



Woah woah WOAH! Crazy statement.

Telescope technology will continue to grow just like most other technologies and 100, 1000, 10,000 years from now will be almost unrecognisable from today's seemingly pathetic instruments.

Their development will continue to follow a similar (if not quite as rapid) development as described by Moore's Law.


They say Hubble can see back to just after the big bang,  now how can that be greatly improved.....??????

Maybe the telescopes of the future will see before the big bang, technology is a wonderful thing, lol.

The advances on Hubble are infra red and other electromagnetic spectrum's.

To me Angry Monkey believes that magnifying glasses of the future will be so much better than the ones of today.

I refute your argument,  any response Monkey?

boggle 09 Dec 11 09:14

Whatever way you look at it, 10 billion solar masses is big. I’m not sure it is 5000 times the radius of the orbit of Pluto though, I think it is less than 6, might be wrong though.

Yes, I got a factor of 1000 wrong there by using one number in km accidentally.

If the size for a solar mass is 3km, then the size for 10bn masses is 30bn km (as r=2GM/c^2).  This is just over 5 times the orbit (semi-major axis) of Pluto - still further than Tesco.

Shouldn't bigger black holes be smaller?

An interesting fact that I've posted many times before but if a car were to drive to the Moon at 50mph, it would take 3/4 a year to get there.

I guess I know what you mean, but it doesn't work like that.

is this a thread on rusty lee ?

Dianne Abbott - one of your lot.

not rusty or diane

this is RBS's off balance sheet financing (83%) owned by the taxpayer

super mind blowing...yep

Mind blowing.....HUGE black holes.....

???????????

Was it a photo of a certain MP with legs akimbo, naked ?

I think she's an astronomer on the quiet, she keeps looking up. All she's lacking is the telescope on the front of her face.

that image is now etched in my mind twomatch....

and not in a good way!!!

I have no idea what you mean.

Very thought provoking.

Whilst there is a good possibility of life existing somewhere/when in the universe, there are huge barriers preventing us from ever detecting

Firstly for every planet that bears life far fewer will boast intelligent life and far fewer still will develop technology.  Dinosaurs ruled the world for 120m years without even inventing the wheel.

Second is the time factor.  For how much of earth's 14.5 billion years has there been intelligent life, capable of space travel and radio communication?  The chances of more than one such planet coexisting are vastly reduced.

Finally the distances play a significant part too.  There could easily be thousands of civilisations existing right now way too far away to ever stand a chance of communicating or visiting us.  Or we may get a message sometime from a civilisation that has been extinct for billions of years.

Angel Gabriel
07 Dec 11 20:50 Joined: 09 May 05 | Topic/replies: 3,831 | Blogger: Angel Gabriel's blog
See we still dont really know what came first, on Earth.

The virus or the host?


That's as daft as asking what came first, reading or writing?

Also, the big bang was when space and time were created.  It was the start of time so "before the big bang" doesn't exist in the same way as "outside the universe" doesn't exist.  We cannot conceptualise this however.

"Dinosaurs ruled the world for 120m years without even inventing the wheel" doubt the dinosaurs really needed wheels tbh.

Neither did we.

catfloppo Joined: 16 Nov 06
Replies: 1158 01 Feb 12 13:34   
Also, the big bang was when space and time were created.  It was the start of time so "before the big bang" doesn't exist in the same way as "outside the universe" doesn't exist.  We cannot conceptualise this however.

..that depends on whether indeed the universe did start with a "big bang"....

..and also whether you think the concept of "time" exists without human consciousness to observe it.

..and measure it.

Agreed, but that's true of everything not just time.  Everything we know is based on observation and logical deduction - if we can't rely on that we might as well start making stories up about men in the sky with white beards

That's ridiculous catflap - no-one of sane mind would do that.

Thread of the light year imo.

egner Joined: 11 Jan 07
Replies: 9438 09 Dec 11 10:44   
is it rue that no one really knows what goes on inside a black hole beacause the currently accepted laws of physics can no longer be applied...

(and quite obviously nothing can get in there and sent data back to verify things)...

if so perhaps each black hole is a gateway to a new universe...!!!!..

perhap the mechanics of the black hole are such that it can rip apart the fabric of space and time and at the black holes deepest recess a new universe in formed....

and that this what the "big bang" actually was......nothing but the stored energy of a black hole in some other universe causing our own universe to be born!!!!


maybe this aint far off if tonights fascinating stuff  on Horizon is anything to go by....

dont understand some of it but very interesting stuff.

on iplayer later if anyone interested

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00nslc4/Horizon_20092010_Whos_Afraid_of_a_Big_Black_Hole

..but then again...this still doesnt explain where the very first bigbang..singularity ..black hole or  universe came from...

if you need a black hole to create a universe...but the black hole is formed in a universe..how did the very first black hole form!!

baffling.

hold up there egner - 500 years ago they didn't even know where thunder, lightening and aurora came from!
They're flying at and beyond the speed of light now!

yes ivor....

imagine alll the stuff that will come apparent in the next 500 years....as long as we dont implode as a soceity....

perhaps the true origins of the universe will be found and it will be just as accepted as the fact the earth orbits the sun!!

does it ?

black holes emit radiation don't they? So stuff can escape them.

p.s. there will always be a "then what created..." loop.

..here it is shanalee.....

Diane Abbott thread?

oh dear...

can someone sum up Steven Hawkings theory on the Black hole in a paragraph. Ta

Everything that goes in to a black hole gets condensed to a singularity, a bit like the brain capacity of a Big Brother viewer. Images of things that 'go in' are left for eternity outside, as light can't get in, or out.

I don't think it's by any means 'certain' that life exists elsewhere other than earth in our universe. It's a possibility of course, but it's also possible that we're all alone. It depends on the probability of all the factors that make life happen coming together.

The odds could be higher than the number of atoms in the universe, never mind the number of planets, in which case we would almost certainly be alone in the universe.



I tend to agree with this. I could obviously be wrong but I think we are nothing more than a cosmic accident.

* I think that should read....I could be wrong obviously. These early mornings getting up early trying to pick a winner...

Horizon...What happened before the big bang???

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00vdkmj/Horizon_20102011_What_Happened_Before_the_Big_Bang/

..been on before...interesting though.....

..assuming there was a "big bang" of course.

the only certainty is that people and even scientists seem to equate the size of the universe
with the possibility of life.

There is no correlation, the size of the universe plays no part in whether there is life or not.
It just means that we can`t see far enough to prove that their isn`t.

Excuse my ignorance guys but as a casual viewer of astronomical documentaries, I could've swore I've said 'fcukoff' at my TV when I've been told that black holes can be as small as a pinhead...I was probably pissed though

I was under the impression that even super-massive black holes were relatively small (in size) despite that description as it's all about mass

I reckon a few on this thread have been scared to ask but I don't give a shít

"Black holes do have a finite lifetime due to the emission of Hawking radiation. However for most known astrophysical black holes the time it would take to completely evaporate and disappear is far longer than the current age of the universe. For example, a black hole with the mass of the Sun would take  2\times10^{67}  years to evaporate whereas the age of the universe is only 13.8 \times 10^9 years (thus it will take more than 10^{57}  times the current age of the universe for that black hole to evaporate!). "

and..."Black Hole Evaporation Time


Since the time is proportional to the mass cubed, a black hole with 10 times more mass will take 1000 times longer to evaporate and a black hole with 10 times less mass will evaporate in 1/1000th the time. If you get a black hole with a small enough mass, it will evaporate in a short time. For example, a black hole with a mass of 2.2 \times 10^5 kg will evaporate in about 1 second! This is approximately the mass of a blue whale - but the diameter of the "blue whale" black hole would only be 6\times10^{-22} meters which is about 1 millionth of the diameter of a proton! In contrast, a Solar mass black hole has a diameter of 6000 meters (or 3.7 miles) and an Earth mass black hole has a diameter of 1.7 cm (or 0.7 inches)."

My wallet is a black hole.

so is betfair.

i believe that when two black holes get to close together one swallows the other,so if the betfair blackhole and the call me a taxi blackhole get to close to each other it may not be too promising.

...British astronomers have found 5 new super massive black holes previously obscured by dust and gases.....

...does every black hole lead to another universe?????????????

..perhaps!!!!...yep

...maybe the "big bang" was nothing more than all the energy flowing from a black hole.....through a rip in an adjacent universe caused by a black hole in that universe...

I watched the numpty on Sky news trying to explain about this story. He was completely out of his depth and knew nothing about the subject. He was talking in miles and kilometers didn't have a clue about size or distance. When the co presenter asked him a question he couldn't answer it so he just repeated the blurb he was already going over. Totally clueless.

MoneyTree lays another black hole.