Youngest Black Hole....

Next time the mood is right... explain to somebody how looking up at the stars represents a look back in time... that each dot of light represents a completely different year, millennium, etc. Most people (those not reading this thread) have never even thought about it. I dated a girl back in high school that thought "shooting stars" were REAL stars that just went streaking across the sky... (and laughed to myself... because I'm sure you guys realize the whole impossibility of that... i.e. from our perspective... a star = a dot of light... and to cross a giant angle of view in the sky in one second would mean the star just propelled a bazillion light years in that second)...

Anyway... point is... share some of your astronomy knowledge with others... you'll be surprised how little the rest of the world thinks about this stuff.
 
MattinSTL said:
Anyway... point is... share some of your astronomy knowledge with others... you'll be surprised how little the rest of the world thinks about this stuff.
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That's because, the more you think about it, the less significant you feel in the big scope of things. Our entire lives are not even a blink of the eye...
Depressing to some... exciting to others. Personally, I spend too much time thinking about this stuff, to the point my head is going to explode!
I just want to know what happened 2 seconds before the big bang... is that asking too much?

http://hubblesite.org/explore_astronomy/black_holes/
 
ZazaCast said:
I just want to know what happened 2 seconds before the big bang... is that asking too much?
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I thought there weren't any seconds before the big bang?

I mean, if there's no moving matter in the universe, there can't be any time either can it?

It's like, the Universe ends where the furthest piece of matter in any given direction is at that moment. Beyond that, there's no matter so there's no Universe. If you go beyond that point, you expand the Universe with your own matter and if you go back in time to before the Big Bang to meassure 2 seconds with your watch you start creating time as you observe it.

Right?

Or am I way off course here?
 
Jawa Ex Machina said:
I thought there weren't any seconds before the big bang?

I mean, if there's no moving matter in the universe, there can't be any time either can it?

It's like, the Universe ends where the furthest piece of matter in any given direction is at that moment. Beyond that, there's no matter so there's no Universe. If you go beyond that point, you expand the Universe with your own matter and if you go back in time to before the Big Bang to meassure 2 seconds with your watch you start creating time as you observe it.

Right?

Or am I way off course here?
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Exactly!

ExplodingHead.gif
 
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Mile Bozicevic said:
I still don't get how astronomers measure time of these things.
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Well it's 30 years old because it was observed 30 years ago as an explosion.

If you're talking about the 50 million years old thing, it's pretty easy. First they find the distance. Think of it as a triangle. If they have two telescopes and point it at the star, then they measure the distance between the telescopes, and with simple triangle equations (forgot my math) they can figure out the distance.

Now when something is 1 light year away which is approx under 10 trillion KM, then that means the light we see from a star 1 light year away will be the light it produced one year ago. If a star is 50 light years away, then what we're seeing with our eyes occured 50 years ago. And so this blackhole is around 50 million light years away.
 
Jawa Ex Machina said:
I thought there weren't any seconds before the big bang?

I mean, if there's no moving matter in the universe, there can't be any time either can it?

It's like, the Universe ends where the furthest piece of matter in any given direction is at that moment. Beyond that, there's no matter so there's no Universe. If you go beyond that point, you expand the Universe with your own matter and if you go back in time to before the Big Bang to meassure 2 seconds with your watch you start creating time as you observe it.

Right?

Or am I way off course here?
Click to expand...


Well if you look at M-theory, it says there is a multiverse. So beyond our universe there are other universes. The theory says that our universe was created by two branes hitting each other. So theoretically currently there are new universes being created as we speak. Each of which may have a different set of physics entirely.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse
So this theoretically leads to the conclusion that there was technically no "beginning" of time, via the big bang and the beginning goes back way further to the creation of the multiverse. And from there; there are theoretically multiple multiverses.

Distance of stars is generally measured via the red shift. The further away from a star the earth is the reder the shift.
 
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Jon Starr said:
Well it's 30 years old because it was observed 30 years ago as an explosion.

If you're talking about the 50 million years old thing, it's pretty easy. First they find the distance. Think of it as a triangle. If they have two telescopes and point it at the star, then they measure the distance between the telescopes, and with simple triangle equations (forgot my math) they can figure out the distance.
Click to expand...

They can use parallax up to a certain distance, which is sort of like triangulation based on the opposite ends of Earth's ORBIT. Which means measurements 6 months apart. But beyond that distance, it's not useful.

But for things like 50mill light years, they might use many other techniques like Cepheid variable.
 
all this talk about astronomy is getting me excited. if conditions are right i may have to break out the 8 incher tonight.
 
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