Center of our galaxy
Posted on: January 15, 2012 - 10:07am
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Center of our galaxy
I am listening to hawking's briefer history of time. It was talking about how our understanding of what the milky way was and how we are just on the edge of our galaxy. What is at the center of our galaxy? Are there named stars?
Religion Kills !!!
Numbers 31:17-18 - Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
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I thought recent research is starting to find a black hole at the center of galaxies. No?
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http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/11/1102_051102_black_hole.html
(another post that wouldn't exist if SOPA passed)
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That would be cool if Stephen Hawking read it so you could hear his robotic voice. It adds a mysterious touch, but I couldn't listen to a whole book read by him. (Maybe I could.) Sometimes it's hard to understand him and I would get annoyed and want a human voice.
Did you see on Discovery that new series Curiosity? The first episode was about Hawking and his response to the backlash against his new book The Grand Design. It was pretty cool. They went back and forth between using his robotic voice and a voice actor. I think it was a man with an English accent too; Hawking's original sound!
I have A Briefer History of Time, but haven't read it yet. I read that it was more accesible to a lay audience than A Brief History of Time; the first one a lot of people said was too advanced to understand for laymen.
So, is this your sermon for Sunday? It probably beats church!
The center of the galaxies are supposed to be these super massive blackholes.
There are many, many names for stars, but you can see more here:
http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations/starname_list.html
It's obvious what's at the center: God sitting in his La-Z-Boy recliner watching re-runs of Friends while he sips on his Pabst Blue Ribbon and munches on Cheetos.
Almost every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at the approximate centre. The milky way does as well. Direct observations are fairly recent due to improvements in technology.
Those galaxies which don't, appear to once have, until collision or close encounter with another supermassive black hole during a galactic merger gravitically fired the supermassive black hole out of its host galaxy and into the cosmos at incredible speeds.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
I've never read an article where the galatic black hole was ejected. You got a cite for that?!? It would be a very interesting read!
(Edited to add ...)
Google and ye shall find --
http://news.discovery.com/space/black-hole-galaxy.html
"Obviously I'm convinced of the existence of G-d. I'm equally convinced that Atheists who've led good lives will be in Olam HaBa going "How the heck did I wind up in this place?!?" while Christians who've treated people like dirt will be in some other place asking the exact same question."
There is a professional reader. I too have a hard time understanding him. I saw an interview on youtube with him, Clarke & Sagan. When Hawking would tell a joke everyone just blankly stared at him and then they saw him smile, with that they laughed.
No, I hadn't seen Curiosity. I will start recording it.
Listening to the audio is a challenge for me. I have some understanding because of the great minds on this website, but I see my brain gets tired after awhile. Maybe that is not good while driving 70mph down the highway.
But it is definitely, definitely, definitely worth my time.
Amen brother. For today's sermon I will quote Briefer chapter 5 versus 20 and 21
Imagine a ball 8 miles in size. Now imagine a teaspoon. Fill both with grains of salt. The teaspoon represents how many stars we can see with our eyes. The 8-mile ball represents how many stars we now know exists after the invention of the telescope. This good book really shows how proud primitive religious man was. Center of the Universe. Science just laughs at that now. The religious man has no clue what true humility is, but the scientist does. Which do you choose?
Religion Kills !!!
Numbers 31:17-18 - Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
http://jesus-needs-money.blogspot.com/
I thought our galaxy would look like this
Source: Hubblesite.org
In the audio book Hawking's does say we think there is a black hole at the center of galaxy. Need some edumacation. If you take a picture of a black hole it would appear black right? If so, then if the galaxy above had a black hole at its chewy center wouldn't it be dark instead of so bright? I thought our center had a bright center.
This is supposedly our galaxy
This indicates Orion and perhap it's belt is within our galaxy.
Religion Kills !!!
Numbers 31:17-18 - Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
http://jesus-needs-money.blogspot.com/
The galactic black hole at the center of the galaxy is, at most, light seconds across, so you wouldn't be able to see it in an image anyway -- it would just be too small of a black speck. However, the real reason you can't see a black spot is because there are plenty of other stars in that area, above, below, around, etc., that you can see.
"Obviously I'm convinced of the existence of G-d. I'm equally convinced that Atheists who've led good lives will be in Olam HaBa going "How the heck did I wind up in this place?!?" while Christians who've treated people like dirt will be in some other place asking the exact same question."
Yeah. The closer to the core you get, the greater the number of stars. And thus the brighter the sky. Which makes it much harder to see a dark spot, let alone differentiate a void in space from a black hole.
Because a black hole absorbs light, the only way to actually see one in our visual spectrum is to have it back-lit. Even then you aren't actually seeing the black hole, but the shadow it casts.
I'd guess the black hole in that photo would be less than 1% of a pixel in size. Impossible to see even if back-lit.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
On the one hand it is supermassive. On the other it is only seconds wide in size or 1% of a pixel in the photo.
Please explain this contradiction.
Religion Kills !!!
Numbers 31:17-18 - Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
http://jesus-needs-money.blogspot.com/
Mass doesn't equal size. If the Earth were to turn into a black hole, it would be smaller than your fist. Probably smaller than a grain of sand. But it would still have the same mass, or weight.
If the sun became a black hole of equal mass, it would be smaller than Mercury. Maybe as small as a grain of sand (I'm not going to do the math to give you an exact size as I'd have to learn it first
). But Earths orbit would be unaffected.
What happens is that matter is compacted to incredible, perhaps infinite, density. It would weigh so much that a collision with a solid metal wall would be reminiscent of throwing a stone into a pool. The metal would splash as if it were a liquid. The black hole would pass through any known material unimpeded or slowed. Even diamond or metallic hydrogen.
But it is no bigger than its weight will allow. A supermassive black hole has the mass of billions of stars, but is smaller than our solar system. All the mass is as compacted as it can be, so far as we know.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
So could the mass of our universe have been compacted into a near zero dimension before the start of the big bang?
In this way could the universe have always existed and therefore would not come from nothing?
All objects in the sky are moving rapidly away from our planet and if we were at any point in the universe it would appear just like that and thus the expanding universe. What I cannot understand how could the big bang have started from a specific point. It would seem we would be able to locate that spot in the sky. The example in Hawking's book is the universe is like an expanding ballon expanding out in all directions. However there still would be a source center. If I was on a molecule in there I should see some molecules in parallax. Some would be running with me but going slightly away just not as fast as say the ones that were 90 degrees or greater at the start. Where am I missing?
Religion Kills !!!
Numbers 31:17-18 - Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
http://jesus-needs-money.blogspot.com/
1: Yes, perhaps.
2: Yes, perhaps.
Though neither of those questions has been empirally answered, and it's equally possible that something else was going on.
3: Well first the vastness of the universe. We can't see more than half of it simply because light will never be fast enough to catch us from objects travelling away from us, so we can't see enough of it to determine a centre.
Secondly is that space is curved. Unfortunately I don't know how to explain this or how it affects our perceptions or ability to determine a centre.
Thirdly is the sheer number of objects and their varying speeds and trajectories which defy our limited capability to calculate.
We will have to catelogue every visible phenomena, its velocity, and its trajectory just to get an inkling of where the centre might be, if there yet remains a centre.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
I'm going to try to explain this, but I've had 2 glasses of wine, so bare with me
I think the biggest misconception regarding the big bang is that you should observe it as you would an explosion. An explosion has a center that you can point to, and say "It blew up there", following that you have debris flying in all kind of directions within space and so on. The first thing you need to understand is that there is no space as we understand it, or that we can perceive outside the Big Bang. The Big Bang is all there is, we are in it now, still "banging" so to speak. There is NOTHING for the debris to fly into, in fact there is no debris, there is only the center, we are that CENTER that you are looking for, the universe is it. It has just expanded a few times in the 13.7 billion years or so. About the only thing we can detect is the background radiation, think of it as the balloon, and we're inside that balloon detecting that edge. Sorry, eloquence eludes me after one glass of wine, after two all bets are off, so I hope that makes sense.
The going away from us thing only works on the galaxy scale. Not a lot is going away from our planet in our neck of the woods. The way that works, is that space expands. The rate is increasing, but that's really irrelevant to this particular discussion. The fact that it is actively increasing means that the distance between any two points will get larger (we're talking galactic scale here). So if you have 4 galaxies in a line, for the sake of the argument, and the space between them doubled every so often, that means that the further away they were, the faster they would seem to be going away from us.
That's why that big telescope in the sky was named Hubble. Good ole Hubble made this discovery. Bottom line is, there is a limit to how far we can see, a horizon so to speak after which the speed at which space expands is grater then the speed of light. Again, this doesn't violate relativity because nothing really is moving, we're talking about stationary objects relative to themselves, moving away from one another faster then the speed of light due to space expansion.
This is however, not why you cannot observe the "big bang" it just explains a weird aspect of the current cosmological model, you cannot see the big bang because we are the big bang
I hope that makes sense.
"Don't seek these laws to understand. Only the mad can comprehend..." -- George Cosbuc
http://www.universetoday.com/13002/what-happens-when-supermassive-black-holes-collide/
http://news.discovery.com/space/colliding-black-holes-twist-and-stretch-spacetime-110414.html
Wish I could drink wine.
Also, there was no "big bang" that is the fault of the media. There was no sound and no explosion.
maybe it was the wine. I am still scratching my head. In the balloon example the air is rushing in at the opening so there is a starting point. Are you saying that is where the comparison breaks down? We are expanding in all directions, but I think that implies some starting point. We may not be able to see it exactly. Perhaps there are lots of different motions going on, which confuse the starting point. Earth is spinning on its axis and moving around the sun and turning around in the galaxy and the galaxy is moving in its entirely out somewhere and perhaps even expanding out itself. The sun I think is spining. It just going in every direction. I guess if you are having you wine now you might be getting nauseous with all the spinning directions. Hawking talking about 1 second after the "big bang" the temperature was 10billion degrees and then very shortly after that it went down to 1 billion degrees. That has got to get something moving.
Anyway, please tell me more.
Religion Kills !!!
Numbers 31:17-18 - Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
http://jesus-needs-money.blogspot.com/
hehe,
It must have been the wine, I just read what I wrote, it sort of makes sense because I know what I meant to say. Ok, let's try this again.
Think of the initial universe as a grape fruit. Nice, relatively small sphere. Now everything that is contained within the universe is within this grapefruit. (in reality it was much, much smaller then a grapefruit, but don't worry about that now). Think of this fruit exploding, but the only perspective that you have, is from inside the fruit. So you cannot see it from outside, blowing up and projecting debris everywhere, you can only see INSIDE the grapefruit. What would you see?
Well, initially there would be a great rush of energy as everything pushes away from itself. But the actual "blast" of energy created matter, meaning the actual act of rapid expansion is responsible for everything around us. So everywhere you look, the stars, galaxies, EVERYTHING is that initial "blast" that you are looking for. There is no visible center, we are the center, everything is the center... If there is such an actual center, like the center of a ball, it doesn't really have any more luminosity or any more matter then any other part of a ball. The balloon analogy I attempted while drunk, was not to indicate a "blow hole" as the big bang. But the center of the balloon as the big bang. The "skin" of the balloon is the background radiation. That's why it is EVERYWHERE we look, because we are inside that balloon looking out. In conclusion, everything is the blast, not everything started FROM the blast.
That's the misconception, you are thinking of a real world explosion, or let's say a grande blowing up in space. But the universe doesn't have space to blow into (as you and I would understand it), it creates space as it expands.
"Don't seek these laws to understand. Only the mad can comprehend..." -- George Cosbuc
Then how are they able to say, it blew up then(13.7 billion years ago)? I thought time was another dimension that can be warped, subject to relativity. Time did not exist before the big bang right? So one instant it time did not exist, next it did??? Did this dimension just come into existence?
I've always had a hunch I was at the CENTER of the universe.
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This was in the news this evening...
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/17/10176324-scientists-to-catch-a-black-hole
I always wondered what it would be like to have six or eight Hubble Telescopes in orbit around the Earth. Can you imagine the intense 3-D images they could make?
Time is a whole other discussion, we don't want to go there now because it would just confuse things further. But that is a good question, and there is no clear answer. I just wanted to go across that there is no one point, or explosion you can point to and say "That there is the Big Bang".
For the sake of the above argument, time is really nothing more then a direction that the universe expands into, so to speak. You can say that the expansion increases in the forward arrow of time, and decreases in the reverse arrow. The universe gets "older" as you increase time, much like it would get "longer" if you increase length, and so on. Past that, the fundamental nature of time is very poorly understood, even by physicists.
"Don't seek these laws to understand. Only the mad can comprehend..." -- George Cosbuc
The distances involved are so huge that the difference between the images would be less than a pixel. Getting a pair of Hubble telescopes on opposite sides of the sun, in Earth orbit, would be totally bad-ass. Conveniently, the Hubble telescope is on opposite sides of the sun every year
"Obviously I'm convinced of the existence of G-d. I'm equally convinced that Atheists who've led good lives will be in Olam HaBa going "How the heck did I wind up in this place?!?" while Christians who've treated people like dirt will be in some other place asking the exact same question."
I want to see a system array. Dozens or hundreds of telescopes stretching from Mercury to Pluto to Neptune. That'll be so awesome. And just think how much we'll be able to see when we get a few outside the solar system!
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.