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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

#81

Post by mrsmee89 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #26

What I don’t understand is where the material for the stars is coming from? Is there that much dust in deep space? Or did it collect it from the galaxy?

I had the same question! From what I can gather, the black hole is plowing through gas, when the gas gets too close to the black hole, it gets sucked in and forms a disk around the black hole. As the gas disk spirals in towards the black hole, it gets heated up and shocked, causing it to fragment and form clumps. These clumps eventually collapse under their own gravity, forming stars. How cool is that!

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

#83

Post by brotchie »

dividefuel wrote: post #29
irrational wrote: post #12

Imagine intelligent life arising on a planet around one of those stars. I wonder how long it would take their astronomers to figure out where they were.

This would be an interesting premise for a science fiction story. You could imagine a species realizing that the only way to survive long term is to keep hopping to new star systems every billion or so years. And when they get ready to hop to another system for the first time, they realize almost all the viable star systems are already colonized by past species who came to the same conclusion

Greg Egan’s Incandescence is along these lines except replace star in the trail of a black hole with asymmetric asteroid around a black hole accretion disk.

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

#84

Post by MAGZine »

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.

I suppose it's easier to believe you're a special snowflake than it is to believe you're just average.

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

#86

Post by once_inc »

For those replying to this article with "imagine living there", please note that if life is a verdant, resilient and common as many of us hope it is, the universe might contain quite a number of insane places to live:

- Near the center of a galaxy, where stars are so closely packed together that the night sky is filled with bright lights, perhaps illuminating their world to what we experience around twilight, or even brighter.

- Far removed from the center of a galaxy, or even on a rogue star that has escaped its galaxy early on. Very few stars visible in the sky.

- Inside a 'thick' nebula, obscuring all other entities in the sky except for their own star and planets. Imagine an interstellar object like Oumuamua passing through and the complete perplexity of a civilization observing it and wondering where it could have come from.

- A double planet system.

- A system where the planet's orbit is highly elliptic, or where the precession of a tidally locked planet causes day/night cycles.

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

#87

Post by scotty79 »

MAGZine wrote: post #84
darwinwhy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suppose it's easier to believe you're a special snowflake than it is to believe you're just average.

Even though you are unique snowflake there are and will be millions like you.

Maybe we are not special. But we can accidentally be one of the first.

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

#88

Post by once_inc »

unrealp wrote: post #22

I wonder if this is an opportunity to detect intelligent life. If the black hole is affecting any intelligent life on the way, they might do something to save themselves or their planet, which might be detectable?

Please note that the black hole is causing star formation from gas, not moving star systems. From what I gathered from the article, there are very few stars actually in its path, and it is mostly just plowing through a large gas cloud.

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

#89

Post by colordrops »

lmm wrote: post #72
mach1ne wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve heard that book(series?) pop up quite a lot recently. Is it worth a read?

No. It's a tedious slog, devoid of interest on any axis: characters, plot, worldbuilding and science are all paper-thin. Its popularity baffles me.

It's popularity is pretty easy to understand. It was the first proper scifi novel written in the native tongue of over a billion people.

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

#90

Post by scotty79 »

chasil wrote: post #55
yieldcrv wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also, how long does it stay emerged Was it this billion years or that billion years probability of our experience matching another planet’s experience in the same time frame is low

Emergence of eukaryotes specifically entailed aerobic respiration of the mitochondria, which was a massive increase of chemical energy (when glucose and oxygen are present). Chloroplasts enabled direct harvest of photons from our parent star. We are actually older than the plants. These are going to leave a signature in the gas of an exoplanet, if they happen.

Oxygen on our planet was a wasteproduct of life before life learned how to use it.

If some planet had oxygen rich atmosphere from the get go it might have sped up the evolution of life by a billion years or few.

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