Monster of The Milky Way

Monster of The Milky Way

2007, Science  -   40 Comments
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Ratings: 7.71/10 from 42 users.

Monster of The Milky WayAstronomers are closing in on the proof they’ve sought for years that one of the most destructive objects in the universe - a super massive black hole - lurks at the center of our own galaxy. Could it flare up and consume our entire galactic neighborhood?

NOVA takes us on a mind-bending investigation into one of the most bizarre corners of cosmological science: black hole research. From event horizon to singularity, the elusive secrets of supermassive black holes are revealed through stunning computer-generated imagery, including an extraordinary simulation of what it might look like to fall into the belly of such an all-devouring beast.

Space, itself, is falling inside the black hole. It’s rather like a river falling over a waterfall. It’s like that, except it’s space, itself, that’s falling over the cliff. There’s a place where the space starts moving faster than light, so, the light is just trying to get out. It’s rather like a kayaker, trying to make their way upstream, on a river that’s going too fast. They get dragged down to the center of the black hole.

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DustUp
DustUp
6 years ago

Check out the docu "The Principle" referring to the Copernican theory of planetary motion. It is an enlightening more up to date docu about the cosmos. It will shed some light on the possibility that there may not need to be a "black hole fix" to make old theories work if you dump the old theory for a better old theory. They were doing measurements to confirm. Not sure if all the results were in by the time the docu was made but it seems some were and some of the cosmologists were changing their views about a lot of things.

Suppose gravity is an ever present universal push from all sides. If we happen to be adjacent to a large object, it will block one side of that push so the other side pushes us into the object. That is another theory of "gravity".

Tesla invented means of communication using longitudinal waves rather than transverse. Transverse being side to side zigzagging their way forward. Longitudinal being instant. As in NO time elapsed between sender and receiver. Imagine a long miner's chisel. If you lay it on a table and put a sheet of glass up against one end and strike the other, it take zero nano seconds from the time it is struck to the time the glass is hit. It could take some for the crack to spread and the glass to break. Imagine a extremely rigid low mass miner's chisel magically weighing same as the actual one used before, only a mile long suspended in air with a sheet of glass up against one end. It would take the same amount of time for the glass to be impacted when that chisel was struck = 0 sec.

In the suspended bridge experiment. If you struck the side of the rope with a hammer creating a transverse wave, it would take however long suggested for that wave to reach the other end. If you cut the rope, nothing would happen in space unless you cut it in a way that caused it to move and drift away; or rotating objects were being held together in tension by the rope. The lack of tension would be felt immediately on the other end allowing that object to move as it would without being held by a rope. On earth, the impact on the other end of a long bridge would also be instant since the tension would be instantly gone.

The speed of light depends on what medium it is traveling through.

Particles in an atom travel significantly faster than the speed of light. ...about the same speed as politicians to the massive money gravity; and about as fast as they can pour it down a black hole. But no, the speed of light is neither a constant nor the fastest thing.

Just because someone stood in front of a classroom claiming to know something, told you something, and forgot to tell you it was a theory waiting for a better one to come along, doesn't mean they shouldn't have told you. Or was it you who preferred to assume it was all fixed solid truth even though they mentioned it was a THEORY.

Theory = Theory. Theory [not equal to] Fact

If they are spending Billions to research black holes, that will be a never ending research item requiring endless more Billions. They won't find anything and require more to study why not.

If you consider a "black hole" to be the center of a vortex or toroid bowl around which space items like stars and such travel, then maybe. Wish I could recall the name of this modern physicist who gave some video lectures on that demonstrating it with these big red and blue coated magnetic bowls and also with some cool looking plasma.

DustUp
DustUp
6 years ago

4Apr2017 Not available any more. Seems odd that such would get a 9 rating. Who pays these so called scientists to look at things that don't exist? Your tax dollars? Next people will start believing everything was created from a big bang without anything to account for the creation of the materials that caused the stuff from which the bang was caused. Maybe it was a back draft explosion from a black hole that absolutely cannot stop sucking. Then they will start believing that the earth is a sphere ...then that socialism is not inherently corrupt, that nothing travels faster than light, and all manner of things so called scientists who want money for doing nothing tell them. The new mythology is called science based an agenda, propaganda, and gullibility. You don't get funding from the NSF if you don't continue the lies.

Just remember, you are supposed to consider yourself insignificant specs of dust in the universe so it doesn't matter what the overlords do to you. Your choice to believe it or do some actual investigating on your own.

Roy
Roy
8 years ago

Excuse me if I am wrong, but gravity doesn't travel and nor is it an entity by its self. Gravity is an inert property of mass. No mass, no gravity. It may seem like it travels, but that is just the lessening effect, the further away the two objects are from each other. Every single piece of matter is bound by their atoms electromagnetic force that holds things together. It works of course similarly in larger scale objects, which we call gravity.

Also, Black holes are not "holes". They are spheres. They are perceived as holes because we can't see them as three dimensional objects, as we know, light can't escape it, thus it will look like a hole no matter which side you see it from.

Personally, I would rather call them Black Stars from which they once derived from. Calling them Black Holes is like still calling the earth flat or, as we still say that the sun rises and sets, which we all know that the sun does nothing of sorts. We rotate around it at an angle, producing that effect. We really need to update our language according to our knowledge.

Space Nut
Space Nut
10 years ago

complete waste of money!! millions maybe even billions of dollars, just so we can take a picture of a black hole! If they already knew it was there by math, why waste the money to photograph it!! and now that the did then what... nothing! a complete waste of money that could be put to better use. That's America for ya!!

Paul Michaelson
Paul Michaelson
11 years ago

Gravity does not Travel at all, Gravity is simply a depression in space time. Gravity has no mass yet attracts all mass. All objects have gravity.

Arizona Coleman
Arizona Coleman
12 years ago

to be honest....the basis for christianity started after the exodus from egypt, at the consecration of israel as god's holy people at mt sinai. yes, this was *way* before jesus, but it was the beginning that lead up to him. especially since he was the fulfillment of the old ways.

and razel is right in regards to how much gravitational pull is really being emitted. this super massive black hole is nothing but the engine that powers the milky way. it really has no pull on anything as regards to sucking anything in. its rotation is just powerful enough to cause the galactic spin, much like a rotor that creates the magnetic field in a generator.

Nakor420
Nakor420
12 years ago

So the galactic center was first seen by Vigo from ghostbusters 2?

geezernumba1
geezernumba1
13 years ago

@hmmmm, yeh i know.

david the bear
david the bear
13 years ago

@hmmmm just a thought................are you god?

hmmmmmm
hmmmmmm
13 years ago

@God of Truth and Keith too.

First thing to remember is that light (as well as the force of gravity) travels at 186,000 miles in 1 second in space, for reference the earth(the big giant rock under your feet) is about 25,000 miles around. just think about that for a minute, try to imagine it. that will help u in appreciating the black hole's location later on and it's potential for influence on us.

Imagine a top down view of our galaxy, which, in case you didn't know, is a collection of about 200,000,000,000 stars with huge amounts of space between them. an average of a couple of light YEARS worth of empty space between them, so its all mostly empty space. the whole collection revolves around the center. One revolution takes about 250,000,000 years. Also the Galaxy is about 100,000 light YEARS across and about 1,000 light YEARS thick. and for reference our sun is about 66,000 light YEARS from the center. and therefore it takes 66,000 years for light and gravity from the center of the galaxy to reach us.

In the center u have the super-massive black hole, which is best thought of as a dark star. a star with no light, just gravity. there is no directional sucking force. It's a massive object that is warping the space around it towards itself equally in all directions, just like all massive objects do. that warping of space translates to acceleration toward the center of the object and is A.K.A. gravity, "our" super massive dark star at the center of our galaxy is real and measured to have a mass ruffly equal to the mass of 4 million of our suns. (mass/density NOT size/extent) NOTE: gravity gets A LOT stronger the closer u are to the source and A LOT weaker the farther u get from the source.

Our Sun is a little less than 1,000,000 Miles across. our earth is about 8,000 miles across, the Sun is 98,000,000 miles away and it's light and gravitational influence takes 480 seconds (8 minutes) to get here to us. the diameter of earths orbit is 2 X 98 million or 196,000,000 million miles and the distance all the way around the sun is pie times the diameter or 3.14X196 million, so that's 615,440,000 miles in a circle every 365 days that the earth travels through space while the Sun travels around the center of the galaxy every 250,000,000 years.

soooooo...... if u think about it for a little bit you'll realize that the earth and sun line up with the center of the galaxy twice every year, once with the sun closer to the center and once with the earth closer to the center.

but then u need to remember that the center of the galaxy is 66,000 light YEARS away, that's 186,000 miles per second for 66,000 years........ or 60X60X24X365X186,000X66,000 = 387,135,936,000,000,000 miles, my god that is insanely far away considering the earth sun distance from each other is 98,000,000 miles.

so every year, once a year, the earth is 98,000,000 miles closer to an invisible star which is 4 million times heavier than our sun and is 387,135,936,000,000,000 miles away, the earth is 98,000,000 miles farther away once a year as well, each time making a straight line (from a top down view) with earth/sun/black hole. and every year nothing extraordinary happens, so neither will it in 2012 when we are 2/250 millionths of a light YEAR farther around the galaxy than we are today.

we are so far away from the center that we don't feel it at all, it is not the source of the galaxies rotation, the galaxy is surrounded by a giant cloud of invisible stuff(called dark matter for lack of a better word) that is 5 times more massive than the stars and dust in the galaxy, and this weird stuff is what holds the galaxy together and makes it spin, the super massive black hole is in the center because everything on one side of the galaxy is attracted to everything on the other side of the galaxy, so it only makes sense that the heaviest thing would be found in the center.

The times, distances, and sizes involved are so mind numbingly huge that we just don't have to worry about them hurting us here on this tiny little spec of moist rock that is soooo far away from everything.

the only things from space worth worrying about are big meteorites.

ashbreaksstuff
ashbreaksstuff
13 years ago

why do scientists have crazy hair?

Keith
Keith
13 years ago

@God of Truth, what you're suggesting doesn't really add up as far as distances and actual cosmology go. I don't know much about this stuff, but my understanding is that the "alignment" in 2012 is merely a visual one, and has to do with perspective and our orientation toward the center of the Milky Way, and no so much distance. I suppose each time we transit around the the sun in a year we have points of relative closeness or nearness to the center, but at all times our entire solar system is a phenomenal distance from the center. The visual phenomena from Earth's perspective of alignment, if I understand correctly, would have nothing really to do with our proximity to the center. I'm pretty sure the theoretical black hole at the center of the milky way would have to grow and expand for many billions of years to draw our solar system into it. More credible than Nibiru? Maybe. More credible or likely than polar shift? no. More credible or likely than an asteroid collision or a supervolcano eruption? No and no. At least as far as I understand things.

God of Truth
God of Truth
13 years ago

Just a conspiracy theory I have come up with but some of the 2012 doomsday theories suggest that the Earth will be alligned with the centre of the milky way. What if when this happens the Earth is pulled into the black hole?

I'm not suggesting that this will happen but it is arguably as if not more creible then some of the other 2012 theories i've heard.

djrakman
djrakman
13 years ago

the best black hole doco yet

JanHans
JanHans
14 years ago

Narrated by Jim Lampley!

Tyler
Tyler
14 years ago

Cool. Definitely one of the best astronomy docs I've seen.

MadMurad
MadMurad
14 years ago

Good documentary.
I was afraid it was just another quite empty doc repeating over and over the same basic thing but i found this one interesting to watch.
The scientists portrayed are nice to listen to and we get an eye on how they work on the field to get those results.
The visuals are overall pleasant. I found the artistic renderings illustrative and it includes some impressive scientific simulations, like the future collision of our galaxy with andromeda!

maxi
maxi
14 years ago

i am scared now but also excited to know what it's like once you pass through the black hole. i guess when the time comes when the center starts feeding on its environment including our own solar system then we will know...or not know.

see you on the other side!! loved this video.

Kumar Sanghvi
Kumar Sanghvi
14 years ago

Very nice documentary.
Astronomers / scientists are doing a really good study in unveiling the dark and unknown 'Black Holes'. Very interesting observation they have made is that 'Black Holes' are the center of all the galaxies, including our own 'Milky Way'.