Monday, April 29, 2019

A Most-Unusual Black Hole -- One That Wobbles Like a Top, Slowing Down...


V404 Cygni Black Hole Animation from ICRAR on Vimeo.



That is some very well-rendered CGI. Here's this morning's Gizmodo story, and a bit:

. . . .V404 Cygni is a system 8,000 light-years away, consisting of a black hole sucking up matter from a star. On June 22, 2015, scientists working on 10 radio telescopes around the world measured an outburst of jets from the system over the course of four hours, probably caused by the black hole eating matter very quickly -- a cosmic feast. . . .

The jets appeared to swing around by 30 degrees (one-twelfth of a pie) in the sky during that period, leaving behind clouds of plasma, according to the paper published in Nature.

“We’re getting this jet precession much more [rapidly] than we ever thought before,” study author Gregory Sivakoff, an associate professor in physics at the University of Alberta, told Gizmodo. . . .

The star and the disk of matter are slightly misaligned from the black hole’s spin direction, so it produces the wobble. The astronomers then observe the result -- the spinning jets. . . .


Now you know -- and these sorts of celestial events must be just. . . stupefying in real life, could we ever travel out 8,000 light years, to be a witness, with our own eyes. Onward; have a great Monday evening. . . I'm off.

नमस्ते

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