Back To Basics

Black Holes were supposed to absorb everything around them..nothing was supposed to come out of them..now apparently they shoot out cosmic rays ....reminding us again of the truth of that old saying; for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.....

Black holes spew out cosmic rays

An artist’s portrayal of the IC 10 X-1 system shows a black hole at the upper left and its companion star is on the right. Ultra-high energy cosmic rays -- particles that pack the punch of a rifle shot -- make their way to Earth from massive black holes in nearby galaxies, scientists said on Thursday, in a finding that may solve a mystery that has puzzled physicists for decades. Photograph by : Aurore Simonnet/NASA

"This is a fundamental discovery," said Nobel laureate James Cronin, the University Professor Emeritus in Physics at the University of Chicago. "The age of cosmic-ray astronomy has arrived. In the next few years, our data will permit us to identify the exact sources of these cosmic rays and how they accelerate these particles."

British-led scientists now believe the fast-moving particles that bombard the atmosphere are blasted across space from massive black holes at the centre of active galaxies.

Cosmic rays, discovered in 1912, are fast-moving subatomic particles that include the nuclei of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and iron atoms. Evidence suggests they may increase the risk of cancer in pilots and air crews on long-haul flights.

Medium-energy cosmic rays are known to come from exploding stars, while the Sun and other stars emit lower energy cosmic rays. But the source of ultra-high energy rays, which are 100 million times more energetic than anything produced by the most powerful atom smashers, has remained unexplained.

Suggested sources have included giant black holes, noisy radio galaxies, shock waves from colliding galaxies, echoes of the "Big Bang", and bizarre theoretical objects called "cosmic strings".

SEE

Dialectics, Nature and Science

Our Electric Universe

Goldilocks Enigma

9 Minute Nobel Prize

Dark Matters


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298 Baptistina

The more important discovery of a particular asteroid hitting earth, and wiping out the dinosaurs, which is how the MSM covered it, is the final two paragraph's.

IT WAS once suggested, to illustrate the chaotic and unpredictable way in which natural systems behave, that the beat of a butterfly's wing in China could eventually trigger a hurricane in the Atlantic. A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but the point was that even in the theoretically deterministic world of Newtonian mechanics, only a small amount of complexity is needed to make practical prediction well nigh impossible.

Thus it is perhaps not as far-fetched as it sounds to suggest that the collision 160m years ago of two space rocks, albeit quite large ones, resulted in the stormy death almost 100m years later of the dinosaurs and many other species on Earth. For although the orbits of the planets look to astronomers like a model of regular, Newtonian clockwork, on a scale of millions of years, the solar system is every bit as chaotic as the Earth's weather.

Around 65 million years ago, one 10-kilometre-wide piece crunched into Earth, unleashing a firestorm and kicking up clouds of dust that filtered out sunlight. In this enduring winter, much vegetation was wiped out and the species that depended on them also became extinct. Only those animals that could cope with the new challenge.

The trace of the great event, called the Cretaceous/Tertiary (or K-T) extinction event, can be seen today in the shape of a 180-kilometre-diameter impact crater at modern-day Chicxulub, in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula.

The trio of researchers – William Bottke and David Nesvorny of Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, U.S. and David Vokrouhlicky of the Czech Republic's Charles University in Prague – took their theory a stage further and checked out sediment samples from the Chicxulub site. They found traces of a mineral called carbonaceous chondrite, which is only found in a tiny minority of meteorites, as the Earthly remains of plummeting asteroids are called. Most asteroids can be excluded from the Chicxulub event, but not Baptistina-era ones, they contend.

Putting simulation and chemical evidence together, the team rule out theories that a comet was to blame rather than an asteroid, and say there is a "more than 90 per cent" probability that the killer rock was a refugee from the Baptistina family.

The investigators also argue that there's a 70 per cent chance that a four-kilometre-wide Baptistina asteroid hit the Moon some around 108 million years ago, forming the 85-kilometre crater Tycho.

An important point raised by the study "is how severe the repercussions of cataclysmic collisions in the asteroid belt can be for the Earth–Moon system," commented geologists Philippe Claeys and Steven Goderis of Vrije University in Brussels, Belgium, in an accompanying commentary also in Nature.

"The terrestrial impact record needs to be scrutinized more closely to identify and understand these periods of more intense bombardment, and to link them to the huge and dangerous game of billiards continuously being played out between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter," they said.

Science Photo Library

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Hoax

Two moons on 27th August 2007?

An eclipse wrongly called a double moon? Or is it Mars?

It's Neither.

As Molly's Blog points out

As Molly has made plain in a previous post (see' What's All This Double Moon Stuff' earlier today) there will not be either any "double Moon" or "double eclipse" on the upcoming lunar eclipse in the early morning of August 28th. It will be the regular and ordinary lunar eclipse.

And the Mars post circulating by email, appears to be based on events in the recent past.

Planet Mars will be the brightest in the night sky starting August.

It will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. This will cultivate on Aug. 27 when Mars comes within 34.65 Million miles of earth.
Be sure to watch the sky on Aug. 27 12:30 am. It will look like the earth has 2 moons.
The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287.

The text of this rumor was roughly accurate when it first began circulating in the summer of 2003, outdated when it went around again in 2005, and just plain false when it appeared for the third time in 2006. It is now 2007, and making the rounds again. How many times can a "once in a lifetime" event occur?

The oscillating orbits of Mars and Earth did, in fact, bring the two planets closer together on August 27, 2003 than at any other time during the past 50,000 years. Though Mars never actually appeared "as large as the full moon" -- not even close -- for a few days in 2003 it was indeed the brightest object in the night sky.

On August 27 of that year, the orbital paths of Earth and Mars brought the two planets to within 34.65 million miles of one another -- closer than at any other time in the past 50,000 years. Though Mars never actually appeared "as large as the full moon to the naked eye" (as claimed in the email), the red planet did vividly dominate the night sky for a time, making 2003's close encounter a once-in-a-lifetime event indeed for astronomers, space enthusiasts, and ordinary observers alike.

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