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Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

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Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

#41

Post by chasil »

Maursault wrote: post #39
chasil wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before any of that is possible, a "Cambrian Explosion" is required. It may be that prokaryotic life is common, but the mitochondria and plastids of eukaryotes took a very long time to emerge (absent for more than half of the total habitable life of the earth).

> but the mitochondria and plastids of eukaryotes took a very long time to emerge. Not an expert, but mitochondria didn't " e merge." Mitochondria co-evolved as bacteria, merged and became organelles through complex protein-import machinery and insertion into inner membranes of protein carriers for extracting energy for the host cell.

There were no eukaryotes... and then there were.

This was the ignition of complex, multicellular biology. What else could explain it?

I will admit that I thought they were closer to the Cambrian Explosion. This is much farther away than I thought.

"Eukaryotes emerged approximately 2.2 billion years ago, during the Proterozoic eon, likely as flagellated phagotrophs."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eukaryote

Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

#42

Post by icambron »

andrewstuart wrote: post #20

If you lived on a planet going around one of those stars it sure would be hard to make sense of the universe. "Oh I have it! In addition to all the incomprehensible things in the universe, we happen to live in a star system that is extremely, extremely rare and exeptional, unlike the rest of the universe!"

You can imagine the pivotal moment here, where someone (according to Wikipedia, it was Immanuel Kant, which is a neat fact all by itself) said "hey, that band of faint stars could be a gravitationally rotating disk seen from the inside, and what if those other oblong smudges we see are entire other disks really really far away?"

For residents of our hypothetical planet, that moment, which seems very important to me, would be hard to have!

Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

#43

Post by taneq »

i-use-nixos-btw wrote: post #5
alex_young wrote: post #2

Link to actual paper with actual images: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/acba86

I get incredibly frustrated with popular science articles that use only artist’s impressions and avoid the real images. To me, the real images are much more exciting. You don’t need fake clarity and fake colour when you’re seeing a (candidate) high speed black hole sucking the life out of some fricking ginormous balls of flaming nuclear fusion.

Agreed, especially for the headline image of “captured an image of” articles. Artists’ impressions are fine but don’t sell them click bait style as genuine.

Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

#44

Post by Helmut10001 »

icambron wrote: post #42
andrewstuart wrote: post #20

If you lived on a planet going around one of those stars it sure would be hard to make sense of the universe. "Oh I have it! In addition to all the incomprehensible things in the universe, we happen to live in a star system that is extremely, extremely rare and exeptional, unlike the rest of the universe!"

You can imagine the pivotal moment here, where someone (according to Wikipedia, it was Immanuel Kant, which is a neat fact all by itself) said "hey, that band of faint stars could be a gravitationally rotating disk seen from the inside, and what if those other oblong smudges we see are entire other disks really really far away?" For residents of our hypothetical planet, that moment, which seems very important to me,…

This is an analogy to the Three Body Problem from Liu Cixin!

Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

#45

Post by s1artibartfast »

Maursault wrote: post #39
chasil wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before any of that is possible, a "Cambrian Explosion" is required. It may be that prokaryotic life is common, but the mitochondria and plastids of eukaryotes took a very long time to emerge (absent for more than half of the total habitable life of the earth).

> but the mitochondria and plastids of eukaryotes took a very long time to emerge. Not an expert, but mitochondria didn't " e merge." Mitochondria co-evolved as bacteria, merged and became organelles through complex protein-import machinery and insertion into inner membranes of protein carriers for extracting energy for the host cell.

You are talking about different semantics. You're talking about a merge in the context of a mechanical process, and they are talking about emergence in the context of speciation. There's no reason to expect the verb to be the same if the subject is different.

Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

#46

Post by andrewstuart »

kevinventullo wrote: post #27
andrewstuart wrote: post #20

If you lived on a planet going around one of those stars it sure would be hard to make sense of the universe. "Oh I have it! In addition to all the incomprehensible things in the universe, we happen to live in a star system that is extremely, extremely rare and exeptional, unlike the rest of the universe!"

To be fair, that does seem to describe the existence of life on our own planet.

I don't think so - in every direction we look things appear largely to be the same. It seems entirely reasonable that extends to life. The only limiting factor is we cannot see other planets to find out.

Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

#47

Post by andrewstuart »

duxup wrote: post #36
andrewstuart wrote: post #20

If you lived on a planet going around one of those stars it sure would be hard to make sense of the universe. "Oh I have it! In addition to all the incomprehensible things in the universe, we happen to live in a star system that is extremely, extremely rare and exeptional, unlike the rest of the universe!"

“Why aren’t we in a galaxy?!?”

"Because we occupy a unique and privileged place in the universe."

That would mess with the scientists.

Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

#48

Post by account-5 »

andrewstuart wrote: post #46
kevinventullo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, that does seem to describe the existence of life on our own planet.

I don't think so - in every direction we look things appear largely to be the same. It seems entirely reasonable that extends to life. The only limiting factor is we cannot see other planets to find out.

I think they might be referring to the fact the human species seems to think it's exceptional and has a unique place in the universe.

Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

#49

Post by darwinwhy »

andrewstuart wrote: post #46
kevinventullo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, that does seem to describe the existence of life on our own planet.

I don't think so - in every direction we look things appear largely to be the same. It seems entirely reasonable that extends to life. The only limiting factor is we cannot see other planets to find out.

Is that a reasonable assumption to make? I don't think we have any evidence of other places we look being "largely the same" with respect to life conduciveness. It took billions of years for our own planet to achieve multicellular life, which is a significant fraction of our best estimate of the lifetime of the entire universe up to this point.

Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

#50

Post by jenadine »

darwinwhy wrote: post #49
andrewstuart wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so - in every direction we look things appear largely to be the same. It seems entirely reasonable that extends to life. The only limiting factor is we cannot see other planets to find out.

Is that a reasonable assumption to make? I don't think we have any evidence of other places we look being "largely the same" with respect to life conduciveness. It took billions of years for our own planet to achieve multicellular life, which is a significant fraction of our best estimate of the lifetime of the entire universe up to this point.

But the universe is big and there are billions of billions of other planets which could very well have similar conditions, that also exist for billions of years
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