Event Horizon Telescope spots source of black hole jets A set of linked radio-telescopes across Hawaii, Arizona and California has given scientists a close-up of the accretion disk of a distant supermassive black hole The linked dishes, dubbed the Event Horizon Telescope, grabbed the fine details of a supermassive black hole in the M87 galaxy, some 50 million light-years distant, …
At 50 millions years, even if we *could" travel at 10 x 'c' as NASA would like, it would still take us 5 million years to get there and see this with our own eyes.
Note to NASA: 10 x c (or equivalent) will not be enough...space/time dimensional tunnelling required methinks...
""These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, its five-year mission, to boldly rape and pillage and poison.."
That of course would be the parallel universe version in Enterprise where in a reconstruction of the Vulcan first contact the humans put a couple in the survey team leaders head and take over the ship.
Best argument against the strong anthropic principle I know.
It wasn't built for us. It was built for creatures that live s...l...o...w...ly. One thought per day rather than one per second, and a life-expectancy scaled similarly.
They might even be living in this solar system ... the slow cold parts thereof. Wild speculation, might what we call a comet be what they call bidding a final farewell to a deceased loved one? Tip the ashes down the gravity well?
Always find the fact the stuff escapes from a black hole (ie the jets) confusing
It doesn't escape. The jets are the stuff that avoids falling into the black hole, after getting close enough to be generally shredded, vaporized, and heated to incredibly high temperatures by the rest of the stuff whirling around that does ultimately fall in.
It's a bit like dust trying to escape a Dyson vacuum cleaner. Very little does. The only way it can, is to go dead straight up the axis of rotation of the vertex.
Well, it depends what you're measuring, innit? You might have difficulty running your tapemeasure along a spacetime geodesic into an actual singularity with infinite curvature and all that, but you can clearly see from flattish space outside that the event horizon of a black hole encloses a finite spherical region of space which would obviously have a finite geometric radius.
I Am Not A Hypergeometrician, of course.
>Do the math
That is fairly difficult math, as most calculations involving black holes resolve to various infinities...
>you would enter into the dimension of time and all eternity would have to pass by before even one atom of your existence could penetrate the event horizon.
This is not entirely true.
Black holes evaporate. Hawking radiation.
Depending on the size of the black hole, the time to complete evaporation might be a week or two, or 10^1000 years, this time scales according to the cubed mass of the black hole. :)
But, the black hole can evaporate. When/as it does 'you' would not exit, but particles which might have been you could. However, as far as we can tell there is no way to know for sure as the information seems to be lost.
For reference <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation>
and for the math adverse, I apologize, have an ale or 3.
When/as it does 'you' would not exit, but particles which might have been you could.
You can't tag particles. There is no such thing as an atom that was you. There's a probability function.
Put two electrons at opposite ends of an otherwise empty container. Wait a very small time. You find two electrons at opposite ends of the box - but there is nothing to say they are still the same way round. It's not that they could have swapped - just that the idea of labeling them to determine whether they have swapped or not makes no sense/has no meaning.
But didn't I read somewhere that the individual bits (the wave interference patterns that makes stuff like matter) have a memory of everything that it's been in contact with? So dif you therefore dilute it in an infinite amount of water, it will cure any ill (as long as it's sold with a high enough price).
OK I'll crawl back under my rock.
Falling Into and Hovering Near A Black Hole
The key point is that if an object goes to the left [inwards to the event horizon], it crosses every single one of the analytically continued timeslice of the outside observers, all the way to their future infinity. Hence those distant observers can always regard the object as not quite reaching the event horizon (the vertical boundary on the left side of [the] schematic). At any one of those slices the object could, in principle, reverse course and climb back out to the outside observers, which it would reach some time between now and future infinity. However, this doesn't mean that the object can never cross the event horizon. It simply means that its worldline is present in every one of the outside timeslices. In the direction it is traveling, those time slices are compressed infinitely close together, so the in-falling object can get through them all in finite proper time (i.e., its own local time along the worldline falling to the left in the above schematic).
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