I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Black hole quasar tsunamis moving at 46 million miles per hour Astronomers have discovered the universe’s most powerful winds: driven by supermassive black holes, they ripple across interstellar space bulldozing through material in galaxies, and are known as quasar tsunamis, we're told. “No other phenomena carries more mechanical energy,” said Nahum Arav, first author of a study into the …
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.
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.
I’m a runner and I get a kick out of passing cars crawling towards the intersection then getting around the corner before they do. Even with my inside line.
As a teenager in West Auckland, NZ I was once running up the Waiatarua hills when a dump truck drew up to the intersection part way up and the guy leaned out and challenged me to a race. I took off like a jackrabbit and only lost by a whisker. He really thrashed that engine and his gearbox.
Later down in Dunedin at university I was sitting at an intersection in town on my motorbike with the woman who I later married on the back. It was a Saturday morning. A car full of young guys pulls alongside and they look at me and gun their engine. When the lights changed I moved off at the sensible pace I used. They dropped the clutch, the back of the car moved up in the air, there was a crunch and their differential disintegrated. I saw it my mirrors.
In NZ if you get caught being a boy racer they take your car off you and crush it regardless of the value.
Later down in Dunedin at university I was sitting at an intersection in town on my motorbike
I once happened to find myself riding a rather aging and somewhat asthmatic MZ 250TS with a sidecar[0][1], on one of the larger through-roads in my city, next to, IIRC, a souped-up Honda CR-X. Its driver got increasingly agitated that I kept pulling up next to his passenger window at the next five traffic lights smiling friendly at him, to the point that he started burning rubber trying to outrun me.
There was also the CBR600 that I managed to out-accelerate for about the first three seconds, but that was probably caused by his being baffled that my hack managed to accelerate at all.
A constant source of amusement were pizza delivery mopeds. Roll up behind them and they hear just another two-stroke. Which they then interpret as a fellow courier so they go into racing mode, waiting for the lights to go green (and not looking at what's actually behind them). At which point the MZ would let out all of its engine power in a massive roar and blast past where pizza boy just manages a feeble 'meeeep' despite its open exhaust.
[0] 19 wheezing two-stroke horses trying to accelerate some 250 kilos total. Top speed was about 110kmh, limited both by power and stability.
[1] In the early 1960's MZ did have the best-performing two-stroke designs, and only after Ernst Degner defected to Japan did Suzuki manage to overtake them.
These days I find the speed limiter more useful than cruise control. OK you need your foot on the accelerator but it basically becomes a footrest unless you want to slow down.
As we have a lot of those nanny signs outside villages, I've been able to verify that the speedo is 10% fast at 30mph, so 33mph on the speed limiter is a genuine 30mph. Google also tells me that 77mph speedo is a genuine 70mph. As the Wiltshire constabulary are enthusiastic users of radar, especially when it's a nice sunny day, I find not needing to look at the speedometer is a significant benefit.
To be fair same happened for me. I was doing exactly the speed limit... for the road... problem was that was the speed limit when I lived there the year before!
It had changed. I did know that. But both me forgetting where the new limits started and a lorry in my way for seeing the sign, me overtaking it as it stopped/turned in to a junction and then seeing the speed camera car I instantly went "clever girl".
Granted they were ready to catch people purposely breaking the new limits but I was rather disappointed my one single lapse got me done.
When they changed the entire village near here and had a static camera I was a route I did every day... so I was the only one *not* to get caught by that camera. Lol!
I know this is all UK here, but here's a heads up if you ever drive in the USA. If the speed limit is 30, you do at least 35. Doing the exact limit in the USA is suspicious behavior. The exception is that if the speed limit is very low like 15mph, then you better do 10mph (but anything > 5mph under the limit is also fineable). Either way, nobody does the exact speed limit.
Here cops don't need silly excuses to pull people over. So doing 28mph in a 30 zone won't get you pulled over.
Doing 10 on a highway will. But from experience they don't mind safe slower driving.
Are you going off 3rd party stories? Or are you in a state where they do pull over "random" people?
As far as random checks, I don't know. I haven't looked it up, but I've been pulled higher than the national average and have never been randomly pulled.
Traffic court (yeh, I might of been doing 30 over). While attending the "lesson", a video was shown with national statistics of the USA of reported violations (with costs omitted, but this still seemed odd). As the speed limit rises along with the population, there still is that tie-in of X amount over yields Y, but the higher the limit AND excess of violation the value of the citation rises (ultimately because of money, with the excise of the "drag racing" limit, most states that limit is 95mph). As of about 7 years ago, you could do up to 12mph over in a 35mph+ without probability of citation. It is all state dependent of course, but these were the mean statistics, and of course there is outliers and census data determinations.
What I have seen in traffic "reeducation" (or whatever it's named this year) has yet come to be, which is 1mph under your states drag racing limit is permitted, but anything at all over yields huge fines. I think they'll never do it, but considering a lot of states are now cracking down on riding the fast lane, who knows.
Supposedly (I cannot confirm this), Montana has made a trade off between taxes and citation values, which makes me wonder just how high those citations might be if this is true.
Now in 15mph posted areas there was no data given (I assume it also includes posted 25mph as well), but it was clear that if you speed at all, you will be cited.
Yep. When i use to do a 25 mile commute to work. People would dangerously do 10 or 20 mph over the speed limit. Over take cars 3 abreast on a normal single carriageway. Go too fast around roundabouts... and I'd still meet them back at the last roundabout just before getting into town ( single long road no really any other destination or alternative route).
There were also constant crashes, bad ones. Half of the road now has average speed limit cameras and that helps. Other half does not and still has more accidents.
Took a two hour 15 min journey yesterday. Used satnav to keep at speed limit instead of the average 10% under the speedo gives. Compared to the satnav guess on arrival time I only saved 10 mins. So 35 in a 30 zone is saving you less time than it takes to put things in your carboot and just putting lives at risk.
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.
I think it would take a couple of hours to cross Wales. We don't really do things like motorways much, and we don't have any railways between north and south, so travel tends to be quite leisurely here, particularly when stuck behind a tractor, a timber lorry or a Mansell-Davies tanker. Even astronomical tsunamis have to learn to chill out and take it easy.
But at the moment we really don't want ANY visitors, astronomical phenomena or human. Please stay at home and stay safe there. Diolch.
The earth would be vaporized before you even saw the flash of light.
Well, the earth being vaporised is bad news, but that would not in itself destroy the earth while still arriving before the flash of light and definitely well before this black hole tsunami which only travels at about seven percent of the speed of light.
Aside from being an awesome band name, "Quasar Tsunamis" is definitely the sort of thing that 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
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.
This post has been deleted by its author
Indeed. Whilst probably fine for physicists, the article is not exactly good communication for mere mortals.
“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."
How many non-physicists equate mechanical energy to light?!? (E.g. for a planet earth example, in energy terms, how much does a 10KW radio transmitter output compare to someone blowing up a balloon?).
Radiation at many wavelengths doesn't cause anything to move. Heat, presumably would, through expansion of gases, but the text is not explicit.
Radiation at many wavelengths doesn't cause anything to move.
Sure it does: photon impacts, though individually providing just a tiny amount of energy, do push on anything they hit. That is why a lightsail works. This has now been demonstrated by direct experiment.
https://www.planetary.org/blogs/jason-davis/heres-what-we-learned-so-far-ls2.html
E.g. for a planet earth example, in energy terms, how much does a 10KW radio transmitter output compare to someone blowing up a balloon?
The transmitter output is power (watts, joules per second, norrislinguini per fortnight), while the quasar outflow is energy (verybignum joules, stillverybignum terawatthours, staggeringlyhugenum hamstersaros).
In short: conformability error
Although it doesn't actually work by direct radiation pressure, the Crookes radiometer was invented 147 years ago and generations of students have seen direct evidence that light can produce mechanical movement. Perhaps TFA should have referred to it, but to be honest I am actually astounded that anybody interested enough to read the article wouldn't know about the radiometer.
Don't recall ever hearing of it or seeing one. Despite having a physics A level.
Regardless, people shouldn't have to have a technical qualification to have an interest in a technical subject and should be able to understand a press report - that's the whole point about effective communication.
I have to admit I am simply astounded that someone managed to do physics A level without coming across the Crooke's radiometer.
I'm similarly astounded that that physics A level has clearly not left the ability to do some simple unit conversions as well as noticing that power and energy are differing simply because one incorporates a time component while the other does not, and hence aren't directly comparable.
Well done both of you for turning an explanation into being about you and what astounds you.
Meanwhile back on topic: “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."
So are they directly comparable or does this statement simply confuse the layman?
Sagittarius A is getting more active according to recent observations, but slowly. Most ejections go perpendicular to the galaxy and might affect things like star formation but wouldn't have any direct effect on Earth. Any mass ejection in the plane of the galaxy would be too far away to affect Earth. So you can go back to worrying about all the other ways the universe has to kill us.
" ... ( can) we make electrickery to sell to alieans ..."
Yes. Once we get there, then manage to build a windmill several million light-years wide.
I'll leave the calculation of when that would be as a test for the student.
Remember to show all working and to use proper Vulture units.
Extra points for an ASCII image of the windmill's design.
It never ceases to amase me when astromoners explain the speeds of matter through the space.
The black holes have been unknown quantities for such a long time, but the Hubble telescope are getting better pictures and providing more information to their existence.
There has to be a reason for the black holes. Whenever I read of ancient drawings found in caves relating to men in space suits, the mind starts to wonder, how often have we humans witnessed what could be alien sightings but there is no evidence of any planets with life forms in our solar system.
I have my own experience of an unexplained areal event.
For many years now I have wondered if it is possible that Black Holes are vents/gate ways into another dimention.
The statement to the Black Hole emitting quasar tsunamis to the rate of 46 million miles per hour, is the latest information regarding Black Holes, previous information regarding Black Holes stated that the gravitational pull of a Black Hole is so great anything that passes in it's zone shall be sucked in.
This latest information has me wondering what if the likelihood of aliens are transporting through these porthole at such speeds of 46million miles per hour, they would not need, much fuel to sustain a long journey by our standards.
I know my imagination is probably wide of the mark, but is it possible.....
I'm curious why you think there has to be a "reason for black holes" - I assume you mean some kind of design to allow us puny humans to travel to somewhere else? There is a lot of quasi scientific cow flop written about black holes, "spacemen" drawing etc, and if you look at the authors they are all trying hard to fit observations to their preconceived ideas, rather than the normal way round.
However, what is confusing you about black holes is the difference between being inside the event horizon and being outside it:
You are quite correct, anything that falls *into* a black hole (ie anything that passes beyond the event horizon) does not come out again
simply travelling past it does not mean you fall into it immediately, the destruction of matter as if falls in releases mind boggling amounts of energy, which drives this "tsunami" as per the article.
There are some really good articles and videos on black holes around, someone posted a great link a few days ago. The way to think of it is like this - a black hole has the same mass, and therefore gravity, as the star or stars that it was created from. It's not some magical space monster. the big difference is that all that mass has been compressed into a single point, close to that point the gravity is enough to prevent even light escaping, but outside that area it behaves like any other massive body in space.
I blame Sci-fi for this. Every, literally *everyone* says "movies don't effect me, I don't believe them I know they are fiction".
They say "you fall into a black hole". No, you orbit it like anything else. If the Sun turned into a black hole this second, you'd only notice when it went dark 8 mins later. Nothing else changes, except the *density* of the object.
The creation of such a thing, in a supernova, or the infalling (from decaying orbits) of the matter around it though, those make things nasty!
I think that were old Sol to make itself over as a compacted object we would be unlikely to ever see anything like darkness. The released energies resulting from the infall would be so bright that they would probably vaporise the planet.
Indeed, https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/ probably applies. https://what-if.xkcd.com/49/ would never have a chance to happen.
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
Cause there's bugger-all down here on Earth.
Looking around for some data to compare that black hole tsunami to I came across an article reporting that the Milky Way is twice as thick as previously measured, so it's clear that looking for intelligent life may have a better chance of succeeding when looking elsewhere.
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