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  Swift black hole videosMay 26, 2011 4:11 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:BBC News just reported that NASA's Swift satellite, which studies gamma ray bursts, caught a burst in April 2009, "Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) 090429B," that they now believe is the most distant object yet known: the detected burst of gamma rays, which are a highly energetic form of light, registered as a fuzzy little red dot just at the edge of their detection capability, and is thought to have come from a massive explosion, perhaps a supernova, occurring 13.14 billion years ago, or just 520 million years after the hypothetical Big Bang.
 
It's interesting to think of all the mysterious bursts of light zinging all around us; this one over 13 billion years ago flew out of a supernova or something, heading just precisely in the direction the not-yet-formed Earth and Sun would occupy much later. And I tried looking this up, but failed; I never see it mentioned, so it's probably wrong for some very obvious reason, but are all those photons, ancient and new, winging around in space, considered when thinking of what "dark energy" might be? Or are they already included in the calculations for regular energy? I guess since scientists seem to think they know roughly how many stars the universe has had and does have, they can calculate the approximate energy output these would have given off, or whatever... And what about the very slight physical pressure--since photons supposedly have just a tiny tiny smidge of mass to them--from all these photons going everywhere? Could that be part of the force causing the expansion of the galaxy? Somebody who knows this, please let me know. :P
 
Anyway that article got me poking around NASA's Swift mission site ("Swift" refers to the bird, and is not an acronym, according to Wikipedia), and man if they don't have a bunch of recent videos concerning black holes! Which makes sense since gamma rays can only come from really energetic stuff like what happens around the massive gravitational pull of black holes.
 
In this video they show the results of a Max Planck Institute supercomputer simulation of merging neutron stars: neutron stars come from supernovas of stars not quite big enough to collapse into black holes, but if two neutron stars then come together, which is the crazy thing this simulation tested, that swirling meeting would produce a huge magnetic field that turns out to quickly coalesce into the torus shape necessary to form intense jets of matter shooting out of the poles of the new central black hole: and those jets are where the energy we detect as *short* gamma ray bursts comes from: most GRBs last a few seconds, and those are thought to come from supernova explosions, but there are much shorter ones, too, and until now it wasn't clear where those short ones could come from; ie, what could create an energy burst of such intensity, but only for a very very short period. Apparently merging neutron stars could do it. Mystery solved?
 
In the next video it's reported that Swift has been able to detect the "missing" active galaxies in the visible universe around us--that is, the galaxies where the central supermassive black hole is sucking in huge clouds of matter, and emitting energy as a result in the form of X-rays. But a lot of these have gas and dust around them--or are sideways to us, so we're seeing them through their surrounding disc--so the X-rays get aborbed, and we can't detect them--until now. Swift is sensitive enough to spot them, and in fact has been finding so many of these heretofore unseen active galactic centers that they say the energy they emit (hey this gets back to that question I had about emitted energy zinging around the universe, in a way) could account for nearly all of the universal background radiation. The findings also seem to confirm that galactic activity in our universe reached its peak about 7 billion years ago, when loads of galaxies had had time to form, and were now crashing into each other and so forth.
 
Which brings us to the third video, which is a nifty simulation of two galaxies colliding; this simulation shows that the disruptions to their shape as they close together would feed material into their central supermassive black holes, making them activate, and then, once the supermassive black holes merged, the resulting "wind" from that merger would blow away most of the remaining galactic material. Anyway, it's pretty.
 
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I have three more videos, and these have nothing to do with astrophysics really. I just heard this song "Eight Zero One" by Lacunae today, and went and looked it up on YouTube, and what do you know but the group has just recently put up a pretty neat video for it.
 
video on Youtube
 
That high-contrast look is sort of like Photoshop's "threshold" filter, which I used to play around with a lot to break photos or game screenshots down to stark black and white images, and doing that kind of got me interested in going back to Photoshop's "Lasso Tool" to try to draw such images by hand, which eventually resulted in the sharp black and white look of A*. So it's a look I like.
 
Lacunae also have a bunch of other really nice songs with inventive videos on their YouTube channel; a few others I quite like are The Loneliness of Lovers and the appropriately-named-for-us Stars Burn Out. Lacunae are sort of a post trip hop group, and I'm a big trip hop fan; there are very few remaining trip hop groups these days, so it was nice to find Lacunae's particular brand of hyper-cut beats.
 
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I should also mention that I'm probably going to be putting ads on the site in the near future, maybe starting in a week or two; if it goes according to plan, they'll roll out in a couple phases. This time I intend to have them all below the comic, in a sort of row of squarish things, basically aping the ad layout of Buttersafe.
 
 
 
 
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