Netizen: Light-year

Friday, November 21, 2014

Some Things Travel Faster Than Light

The lonely photon is now king of the universe as the last of the supermassive black holes evaporate. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Locating Black Holes in Distant Galaxies (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Black hole quasar NASA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The supermassive black holes are all that remains of galaxies once all protons decay, but even these giants are not immortal. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Spooky alignment of quasars across billions of light-years

the rotation axes of the central supermassive black holes in a sample of quasars are parallel to each other. .... alignments of the largest structures ever discovered in the universe. ... the rotation axes of these quasars tend to be aligned with the vast structures in the cosmic web in which they reside. ..... Quasars are very active supermassive black holes at the nuclei of galaxies. These black holes are surrounded by spinning disks of extremely hot material that is often spewed out in long jets along their axes of rotation. Quasars can shine more brightly than all the stars in the rest of their host galaxies put together. ...... 93 quasars that were known to form huge groupings spread over billions of light-years, seen at a time when the universe was about one-third of its current age. ..... a cosmic web of filaments and clumps around huge voids where galaxies are scarce. This intriguing and beautiful arrangement of material is known as large-scale structure. ...... if the quasars are in a long filament, then the spins of the central black holes will point along the filament. ..... a hint that there is a missing ingredient in our current models of the cosmos

This feels doable in this century.

Possible habitable zone planet is a mere 12 light years away

there are several planets around the nearby star Tau Ceti, and one of them is likely to be within the star's habitable zone. ...... Once they had that in hand, the astronomers turned to the actual data from Tau Ceti without any added signals. And, this time, three signals did pop out, with each of them adding between 1010 and 1017 to the statistical fit with the real data. The authors concluded that there were three planets in this signal, orbiting with periods of 14, 35, and 94 days. ...... adding two more planets to their model increased the fit, although not by nearly the same degree. One orbited with a period of 630 days, the second at 168 days. The latter one is the object that resides in Tau Ceti's habitable zone; it has a mass that's at least four times that of Earth's.