Black holes might be intelligent

[Friendly Goatus]

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0005546
Link to PDF on right.

The paper is devoted to a new direction in SETI. After a general discussion of the field, the authors put forth the hypothesis that the black holes may serve as a physical substratum for intelligent beings. This hypothesis is based on four parallels between the brain-psyche system, on the one hand, and black holes, on the other. (1) The descriptions of brain and psyche, in the system brain-psyche, are complementary to each other, as descriptions by internal and external observers of a black hole in Susskind-t'Hooft's schema. (2) There is an aspect of the inner structure of a black hole in Kerr's model of the rotating black hole that is isomorphic to the structure of the human subjective domain in the psychological model of reflexion. (3) Both black holes and the brain-psyche system have a facet which can be represented using thermodynamic concepts. (4) The brain lends itself to a holographic description; as has been recently demonstrated by Susskind, black holes can also be described holographically. The authors speculate that the intelligent black holes can generate other black holes by triggering creation of massive stars from which new black holes arise after the stars' collapse. In addition, the authors analyze certain strange phenomena related to the birth of young massive stars which may or may not be connected with such a triggering.

[Mari_Mar]

Is this thread about fallbacktostone???

[Friendly Goatus]

he does have a blackhole of a personaLITY OH FUCK BURN

[HASHTHRASH]

Is this thread about fallbacktostone???

I laughed out loud. I was gonna post pretty much the same thing.

[Mari_Mar]

Is this thread about fallbacktostone???

I laughed out loud. I was gonna post pretty much the same thing.

EDIT:

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[fallbacktostone]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OJ_287

Its central supermassive black hole is claimed to be the largest known, with a mass of 18 billion solar masses, more than six times the value calculated for the previous largest object.[3]

The companion's orbit is decaying via the emission of gravitational radiation and it is expected to merge with the central black hole within approximately 10,000 years.[3]

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i'm no physicist but i know what matters

[Friendly Goatus]

I knew Galactus was real.

[fallbacktostone]

Is this thread about fallbacktostone???

I laughed out loud. I was gonna post pretty much the same thing.

calling all

ignore these two dudes and post the physical and astronomical phenomena that gets you most ripped and spiritual. unstoppable style..

[neckbeard]

lions and tigers and bears

[Friendly Goatus]

lions and tigers and bears

Are you pissed that god might be a black hole?

[Mari_Mar]

fallbacktostone: good natured amusement's black hole...

[fallbacktostone]

Scientists think that when black holes collide, they generate enormous amounts of energy — more than all the stars in the universe combined according to one recent model — and send out gravitational waves rippling through space-time in every direction.

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fallbacktostone: good natured amusement's black hole...

bro, i'm not going to fuck you. i'll wear any mantle you want though. just try shutting up today until at least page 4 k..

[Comrade Slinky]

Unacceptable.

[Mari_Mar]

I'm not your "bro" fuckface!

[Friendly Goatus]

http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_ ... in_the_sky

...nature has transformed the galaxy cluster into a powerful particle accelerator, perhaps 20 times more powerful than CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC)...

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[fallbacktostone]

not a BH obviously but this is a picture of one of saturns moons called enceladus shooting ice fucking jets into space..

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Jets of Enceladus

The folks at NASA are baffled. They’ve known for several months that Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus emits unexpected jets. But now project scientists face a daunting task—to find the mysterious and highly improbable “source beneath the surface”.

Just a few days ago a NASA news release announced that the Cassini spacecraft exploring Saturn’s icy realm “may have found evidence of liquid water reservoirs that erupt in Yellowstone-like geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus”.

High-resolution Cassini images show icy jets and towering plumes ejecting huge quantities of ice particles at high speed. Project scientists are struggling to understand how this occurs.

The jets are found near the south pole of the 504 kilometer diameter moon, a region recently found to be significantly warmer than models had predicted. (In the image we’ve placed here NASA assigned faint light levels different colors to enhance visibility).

The finding flipped everything scientists knew about Enceladus on its head, because what should have been a dead moon appeared to be geologically active and what was supposed to be the moon's coldest region turned out to be its warmest”, reports Space.com. (See our earlier Picture of the Day, “The Hot Poles of Enceladus”)

"This is as astonishing as if we'd flown past Earth and found that Antarctica was warmer than the Sahara," said John Spencer, an astronomer from the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado and a co-investigator of the Cassini mission”.

In a classic understatement of the theoretical challenge, a NASA news release announced, “The rare occurrence of liquid water so near the surface raises many new questions about this mysterious moon”.

Water “so near the surface”? All we can see is ice on the surface—and icy plumes 480 kilometers high. But conditioned perception declares that liquid water must be present under the surface (like a Yellowstone geyser), in order for it to erupt in high-speed jets. The prior theoretical framework remains untouched even in the face of a stunning surprise.

Cassini’s imaging team leader Carolyn Porco seemed well aware of the potential discomfort from such a revelation. “We realize that this is a radical conclusion—that we may have evidence for liquid water within a body so small and so cold”, she said. "However, if we are right, we have significantly broadened the diversity of solar system environments where we might possibly have conditions suitable for living organisms”.

Or perhaps there is another possibility, one lying beyond the headline value of a possible environment “suitable for living organisms”. How about something more sweeping—a more accurate way of seeing the physical universe as a whole, our solar system included? How about a mind-altering discovery that could re-inspire all of science and scientific education?

The jets are signposts—part of a great collection of signposts pointing in one direction—to the inescapable but unacknowledged role of electricity in our solar system.

Despite the anomalous “warmth” of Enceladus’ south pole, it is a very cold place—minus 261 degrees Fahrenheit! But because it is warmer than it “should” be, NASA scientists jumped to the conclusion that liquid water beneath the surface must be responsible for both the temperature anomaly and the jets.

The only sources of energy available to planetary scientists are solar heating and internal heating (tidal and radioactive). Solar heating is completely inadequate, as all project scientists admit. And why would tidal heating be restricted to the southern hemisphere?

In their strain to explain the jets of Enceladus, the scientists face the same problem confronting theorists trying to explain cometary jets. And they have resorted to the same ad hoc invention of narrow surface vents above a subsurface chamber of (heated, liquid) water. There is no evidence of such vents, either on comets or on Enceladus. Nor have scientists, using their limited toolkit, ever found plausible ways of producing liquid water in the deep freeze of space

On Enceladus, the jets seem to originate from leveed channels, called "Tiger Stripes", eerily similar to channels seen on Jupiter’s moon Europa. (We’ve placed an image of the “Tiger Stripes” here). These stripes are part of a vast and intricate complex of channels on Enceladus that match perfectly the behavior of electric arcs in simple laboratory experiments.

Electrical theorist Wallace Thornhill and his colleagues suggest there is no geyser of subsurface water analogous to the Yellowstone geyser. They say that if NASA will look they will find that the jets move across the surface. And in their motion across the surface, the electric arcs that produce the jets are creating the observed channels as they excavate material from the surface and accelerate it into space.

A strong parallel to the Enceladus plumes is provided by the so-called “volcanoes” of Jupiter’s moon Io. As NASA itself has confirmed, these bright plumes have moved many miles across the surface in the course of observation over a few decades, excavating material and accelerating it upward in jets that precisely match the predictions of a “plasma gun” model.

In the case of Enceladus, a Yellowstone type geyser requires a mixture of vapor, liquid, and ice particles – such a "cold” geyser would require pure water at a temperature of 273K (0˚ C) or above, less than 10 meters from the surface. For such a string of unlikely conditions, the probability rapidly approaches zero.

Testing the possibility that Enceladus’ jets are electrical—a virtual certainty in the eyes of the electric theorists—should be an immediate priority, before scientists convince themselves that we should embark on another expensive and misguided quest for life on a tiny frozen moon in the outer solar system.

Enceladus orbits in the inner regions of Saturn's magnetosphere where the particle flux is high. But "particle flux" is typically nothing more than an astrophysical euphemism for an electrical current. And electric currents in space follow magnetic field lines. Within Saturn's magnetosphere Enceladus will encounter currents in the polar regions. It seems probable that the south polar region of Enceladus has its own magnetic field, which could concentrate an electrical current in that region. In fact, sharp gradients in the magnetic field were encountered during Cassini’s closest approach to Enceladus—a typical indicator of current boundaries.

Planetary scientists continue to perpetuate misunderstanding when they call the “Tiger Stripes” of Enceladus “cracks” that allow water to reach the surface. The channels are, in fact, precise analogs of those seen on Europa. Their frequent parallelism, their ridges or levees, and their ability to cut across all other channels in their paths stand as a definitive contradiction of the “fracturing” hypothesis. The pictures suggest something akin to a “claw” or router bit dragged across the surface in disregard for prior surface relief. That is a unique signature of an electric arc. In contrast, fracturing is invariably affected by a pre-existing surface channel or groove, as anyone who has ever worked with a glasscutter knows very well.

The puzzle of the "Tiger Stripes" parallelism can be simply explained by the phase-locked rotation of Enceladus about Saturn (it keeps the same face toward the gas giant), working in combination with the symmetrical, axially aligned magnetic field of Saturn. This unique alignment will naturally cause the magnetic field lines and their associated discharge currents to move in parallel to each other near the pole of Enceladus as it orbits Saturn. (Further constraints on the pattern may be due to a remnant intrinsic magnetic field in the south polar region).

As for the anomalous temperature readings in the region of jet activity, Thornhill suggests that the readings are way below what project scientists will find if they will measure the temperature at the focal point of a surface jet. Electric discharges become focused and hottest where they touch down on a surface. We are reminded that it was Thornhill who alone predicted that the plumes of the icy moon Io would be much hotter than NASA had ever contemplated. When the Galileo probe took a close look, the radiation overloaded the camera. NASA had not prepared for the surprise. (See “Io's "Volcanoes" Blur Scientific Vision”)

[riley-o]

quit fucking up good threads marissa.

[fallbacktostone]

enceladus ice jets adjusted for light levels

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my dick is so hard i can barely type right now

[Mari_Mar]

quit fucking up good threads marissa.

I haven't fucked with any good threads Riley.

[fallbacktostone]

http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_ ... in_the_sky

...nature has transformed the galaxy cluster into a powerful particle accelerator, perhaps 20 times more powerful than CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC)...

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fuck fuck fuck

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[riley-o]

Many of the brighter blazars were first identified, not as powerful distant galaxies, but as irregular variable stars in our own galaxy. These blazars, like genuine irregular variable stars, changed in brightness on periods of days or years, but with no pattern.

The early development of radio astronomy had shown that there are numerous bright radio sources in the sky. By the end of the 1950s the resolution of radio telescopes was sufficient to be able to identify specific radio sources with optical counterparts, leading to the discovery of quasars. Blazars were highly represented among these early quasars, and indeed the first redshift was found for 3C 273 — a highly variable quasar which is also a blazar.

In 1968 a similar connection between the "variable star" BL Lacertae and a powerful radio source VRO 42.22.01 was made. BL Lacertae shows many of the characteristics of quasars, but the optical spectrum was devoid of the spectral lines used to determine redshift. Faint indications of an underlying galaxy — proof that BL Lacertae was not a star — was found in 1974.

The extragalactic nature of BL Lacertae was not a surprise. In 1972 a few variable optical and radio sources were grouped together and proposed as a new class of galaxy: BL Lacertae-type objects. This terminology was soon shortened to "BL Lacertae object," "BL Lac object," or simply "BL Lac." (Note that the latter term can also mean the original blazar and not the entire class.)

As of 2003, a few hundred BL Lac objects are known.

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what really blows my mind is the excitement each new discovery must elicit; there's simply so much celestial substance and radiant, transcendent information being transmitted that the mere act of gathering of the juggalos it becomes almost a consecrated act

[Friendly Goatus]

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/04/1 ... index.html


Hot now ragman but I think it belongs in here.

PS: why you guys so mean 2 mari

[riley-o]

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PS: why you guys so mean 2 mari

i don't think anyone's being especially cruel here but we're being dismissive because threads have a way of becoming about mari when she posts in them. and sometimes that's totally cool, but other times it's nice to have a thread that's not about that. if marissa wants to discuss the wonders of the stars then no one is going to be nasty to her i will assure you.

[Friendly Goatus]

4th planet discovered inside asteroid belt. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you planet X.

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[Green Chamber]

I fed a star to a singularity in Frisco Bay
he tried to eat my solar system
(He ran away!)