NASA's NuSTAR Sees Rare Blurring of Black Hole Light

NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) has captured an extreme and rare event in the regions immediately surrounding a supermassive black hole. A compact source of X-rays that sits near the black hole, called the corona, has moved closer to the black hole over a period of just days.

"The corona recently collapsed in toward the black hole, with the result that the black hole's intense gravity pulled all the light down onto its surrounding disk, where material is spiraling inward," said Michael Parker of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, United Kingdom, lead author of a new paper on the findings appearing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

As the corona shifted closer to the black hole, the gravity of the black hole exerted a stronger tug on the X-rays emitted by it. The result was an extreme blurring and stretching of the X-ray light. Such events had been observed previously, but never to this degree and in such detail.

Supermassive black holes are thought to reside in the centers of all galaxies. Some are more massive and rotate faster than others. The black hole in this new study, referred to as Markarian 335, or Mrk 335, is about 324 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the Pegasus constellation. It is one of the most extreme of the systems for which the mass and spin rate have ever been measured. The black hole squeezes about 10 million times the mass of our sun into a region only 30 times the diameter of the sun, and it spins so rapidly that space and time are dragged around with it.

Even though some light falls into a supermassive black hole never to be seen again, other high-energy light emanates from both the corona and the surrounding accretion disk of superheated material. Though astronomers are uncertain of the shape and temperature of coronas, they know that they contain particles that move close to the speed of light.

Some of your pics would have made amazing album covers back in the day!!

I used to be really into the mathematics of Fractal Geometry, and how some relatively simple equations can produce images that were both realistic and yet impossible at the same time. These would be just trippy!

I used to experiment with that too... programmed and tweaked the math to get the prettiest pictures. I had a program to create the fractals but that was way back with Dos 3.1. Some had to run a couple of hours (if not longer) to generate the fractal.

NASA Probe May Have Caught Dust from Interstellar Space, a First

Seven tiny grains of rock captured by NASA's comet-chasing Stardust probe in 2004 may be visitors from the vast reaches of interstellar space, researchers say.

These interstellar dust motes from Stardust are fluffier and more diverse than expected, findings that could one day shed light on the origins of the solar system, scientists added.

Interstellar dust motes are bits of rock that permeate the enormous spaces between the stars. Supernovas and ancient stars produce interstellar dust, which contains elements such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen that are necessary for life. [NASA's Stardust Probe Returns to Earth (Video)]

"By analyzing interstellar dust, we can understand our own origins," said lead study author Andrew Westphal, a planetary scientist at the University of California at Berkeley. "Just as people go to Africa to look for fossil hominids, say, 4.5 million years old, trying to understand the origins of humanity, we want to look at stuff that helped form the solar system 4.5 billion years ago."
A comet-chaser captures interstellar dust

NASA launched the Stardust spacecraft in 1999 on a mission to collect dust from the wake of Comet Wild-2 (pronounced "Vilt-2"). Stardust rendezvoused with the comet in 2004 and, in 2006, returned its sample container back to Earth via parachute. [How the Stardust Mission Worked (Infographic)]

But while Stardust captured samples of Comet Wild-2 on one side of the craft's collector tray, the other side was pointed away from the comet to catch bits of interstellar dust in a stream emanating from about the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus. The tray was exposed to space for 195 days to capture particles in tiles of silica aerogel, a porous material resembling frozen smoke, which possesses a sponge-like structure that is 99.8 percent air.

Now, nearly a decade after Stardust's samples reached Earth, a preliminary analysis of the material suggests that seven of the dust motes the probe caught may have origins outside the solar system. If that is confirmed, these tiny flecks of rock will represent the first specks of interstellar dust a spacecraft has ever returned to Earth.

"These are the very first contemporary samples of solid material from outside the solar system that we've identified," Westphal told Space.com. "Instead of looking at interstellar dust with telescopes, now we get to look at samples we collected from space with microscopes."

Fractint! One of the first open source programs. But as soon as I could afford an 8087 math co-processor, it became obsolete. Yea, I remember it taking hours and hours to generate even some simple Lorenz attractors. But the complexity and beauty were worth it!

We are such nerds.

I used to be really into the mathematics of Fractal Geometry, and how some relatively simple equations can produce images that were both realistic and yet impossible at the same time. These would be just trippy!

Some of your pics would have made amazing album covers back in the day!!

Why didn’t the Universe become a black hole?

With all the matter-and-energy so close together and so dense at the moment of the Big Bang, why didn’t it recollapse?

If you knew, from first principles, what the laws of physics were everywhere and at all times in our Universe, that still wouldn’t be enough for you to come up with the prediction that the Universe as we see it ought to exist. Because while the laws of physics set the rules for how a system evolves over time, it still needs a set of initial conditions to get started. This week’s Ask Ethan comes courtesy of a submission from Andreas Lauser, who asks:

While I don’t have many doubts that the theory of the Big Bang (™) is correct (or as you would probably say, a pretty good approximation of what happened), there is a thing I have been wondering when it comes to this part of cosmology for a while: Is there any explanation why the whole Universe did not become a black hole immediately? I suppose that its close to initial density was quite a bit above the Schwarzschild limit.

We’ve taken this topic on before, but you deserve more detail and a better answer than I gave last time. Let’s go back to the birth of our most successful theory of gravity — general relativity — some 100 years ago.

Prior to Einstein, it was Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation that was the accepted theory of gravity. All of the gravitational phenomena in the Universe, from the acceleration of masses on Earth to the orbits of the moons around the planets to the planets themselves revolving around the Sun, his theory described it all. Objects exerted equal-and-opposite gravitational forces on one another, they accelerated in inverse proportion to their mass, and the force obeyed an inverse square law. By time the 1900s rolled around, it had been incredibly well-tested, and there were no exceptions. Well, with thousands upon thousands of successes to its credit, there were almost none, at any rate.

Mystery as SEA PLANKTON found on surface of International Space Station
Experts are baffled how they got there, but claim a study shows that they can live in space despite lack of oxygen, zero gravity, extreme temperatures, and cosmic radiation.

"The results of the experiment are absolutely unique," said the head of the Russian ISS orbital mission Vladimir Solovyev.

"We have found traces of sea plankton and microscopic particles on the illuminator surface. This should be studied further."

The living organisms can not only exist, said a report by Itar-Tass news agency.

But, several surveys proved that these organisms can even develop in seemingly hostile conditions, it reported.

They were found on the surface of the space station using "high-precision equipment" and were apparently discovered during an operation to clean and polish the ISS.