A big bang, but not the Big Bang
We pay a lot of attention to what’s happening on earth, and rightly so.
But this mysterious far-off explosion is certainly of interest:
According to a new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society there is a new champion out there [for brightest explosion]: a cosmic explosion known as AT2021lwx. The explosion, located 8 billion light years from Earth, has been erupting for three years now, emitting two trillion times the light of our sun and 10 times the energy of the brightest supernova ever observed…
More telescopes still were brought online to study AT2021lwx, including NASA’s orbiting Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, the New Technology Telescope in Chile, and the Gran Telescopio Canarias in La Palma, Spain. With those instruments conducting observations of their own, and with other alternatives ruled out, Wiseman and his colleagues have come to the conclusion that the brilliant, steady light of AT2021lwx is caused by a massive cloud of gas many thousands of times the size of our sun that was orbiting a black hole and was somehow disrupted—the astronomers don’t yet know how—causing the gas to fall into the hole. The entire formation, they have estimated, is 100 times the size of our solar system and is currently emitting 100 times more energy than the sun will in its entire 10 billion year lifetime. How long it will continue to burn is unclear, but its light is still streaming our way.
This comes under the heading of one of my favorite Shakespeare quotes. After Horatio has said of a sighting of Hamlet’s father’s ghost, “O day and night, but this is wondrous strange,” Hamlet replies: There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Indeed.
A massive cloud of gas orbiting a black hole. That clearly qualifies as one more thing we have not dreamt of. it seems to me that a cloud of dust without gravity holding it in one place would have dissipated. And if the black hole was holding it together, how did it avoid getting sucked into the black hole? It’s a puzzlement.
8 billion light years from earth? The earth and the sun are not expected to last 8 billion years!
This bang began 8 billion years ago. That is what the light of the bang means, reaching earth now if not before. So who cares? Except very expensive star-gazers funded by the taxpayers building their bibliographies?
Dang, a science article and it contains a mismatch of units: “currently emitting 100 times more energy” The rate at which energy is emitted is POWER. “than the sun will in its entire 10 billion year lifetime” Yes, over a given time period the sun emits a certain amount of ENERGY.
The correct statement would have to state some interval of time over which the explosion is emitting so much energy. Such as, for example, “currently emitting 100 times more energy EACH SECOND than the sun will in its entire 10 billion year lifetime.” Without such an interval specified, the statement simply makes no sense.
Sorry to be so pedantic, but reading such nonsense is painful. (And I am ignoring the usual confusion of “X times more” with “X times as much”.)
Astonishing. And until now, I’ve missed! this astronomy news. (Long ago, I was the youngest founder of my state’s first American Amateur Astronomy chapter. At least one of us did become an astrophysicist.)
Who cares? Asks Cicero. A fair question. Foundations and government have supported the named telescopic observatories. The satellite observatory might be the only one entirely state funded
Apart from bio-bib building, astronomy is simply what Carl Sagan said: the Universe made conscious through ourselves and thus our place in the cosmos. (I know: a romantic answer.)
Yet along with geography, astronomy is our oldest science, dating back to calenders and planting seasons and irrigation control, pioneered by the ancient Sumerians thousands of years ago.
This WOW story may usurp gravity waves, as a leading WOW item in science. Yes, it is big science — but Ligo gravity wave observation takes governments around to world (India will be the newest entrant), and a thousand or more scientists, in part because the signals sought are so faint to the noise.
By contrast, I’d guess this thread header story takes up to 100 astronomers — and costs far, far less than the Big Science gravity wave observing science does.
Yes, it is close to “pure science”, only deepening the SciFi stories we can credibly tell to each other.
Still. The existential meaning may be ginormous. Beyond our imagination.
”So who cares? Except very expensive star-gazers funded by the taxpayers building their bibliographies?”
We all should. The universe is a very dangerous place for life-bearing planets. An asteroid slamming into Earth 65 million years ago made the dinosaurs extinct. That’s a threat we are now only just beginning to be able to counter.
There are other threats out there. It would be beneficial to have a better idea of what and where they are.
“We all should. The universe is a very dangerous place for life-bearing planets. An asteroid slamming into Earth 65 million years ago made the dinosaurs extinct. That’s a threat we are now only just beginning to be able to counter.”
So how is misclassifying an explosion that occurred 8 billion years ago in a galaxy far, far away, as a current event going to help us combat asteroids in our own solar system?
Just curious.
so there had to a supergiant star, to create the black hole,