Hubble finds black hole twisting captured star into donut shape | Hacker News Reader

Hubble finds black hole twisting captured star into donut shape

phys.org

174 pointswglb79 comments

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The other day I was wondering what was coming after James Webb and if I'd be able to see the results in my lifetime.

And then I stumbled across the 100-year-plan to build a "Solar Gravitational Lens"

Would have resolution of 10 square kilometers per pixel for objects 100 light-years away.

Blew my mind to the point I still think about it every few days

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2020_Phase_...

https://phys.org/news/2022-10-solar-gravitational-lens-human...

More "down to earth" (literally) is the Giant Magellan Telescope in 2029 which will have four times the resolution of James Webb but since it is earth-bound I guess atmosphere is going to limit details without AI enhancement

Adding: ooh ELT is 2027, even better, look at Hubble/James Webb in comparison bottom left

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Comparis...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope#Comp...

A bit more plausibly near future, but there was a story about how NASA was testing a method to cast perfect lenses from little more than a mold and a liquid material. If successful, a spacecraft could unfold a frame, release the lens mirror material, and create a surface tens of meters in diameter, all constructed in space. Undoubtedly significant engineering hurdles, but it could result in an order of magnitude improvement in telescope resolution for cheap.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/nasa-tries-new-ways-fluid-...

There was a PBS SpaceTime on the solar gravitational lens proposal not that long ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d0EGIt1SPc

I started watching PBS SpaceTime recently and it really is an exceptionally entertaining channel.

PBS has lots of other similar channels, I liked the math one but it's been discontinued

The irony of ending Infinite Series...

Do not miss Fermilab's Don Lincoln videos.

Here is an awesome video about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI

...and the paper:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08421

I often wonder when or if we might see a photo of a planet around another star and what might it take to do it.

Already been done. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exop...

> Black holes are gatherers, not hunters. They lie in wait until a hapless star wanders by.

Not that it matters much, but lying in wait until prey wanders by is behavior I'd associate with hunters, not gatherers.

I think it's just a bad analogy. Blackholes lie in wait the same way quicksand does. There's no intent on the part of either, not gathering or hunting, they just do what they do.

Aye. Anthropomorphizing leads people to essentialism and its unnecessary to both describe the phenomenon and to learn more about it.

You're the kind of person who read Terry Pratchett's "Reaper Man" and thought The Auditors were correct to fire Death.

I might be! You've identified a very bright gap in my scifi reading. Not sure what I'm saving Pratchett for, but I appreciate the reminder to read his works.

Oh you're in for a treat. I personally like the Audiobooks read by Stephen Briggs, but Penguin just last year redid the whole set with an all-star cast. Great time to get into Discworld.

Yeah it makes little sense to compare it to people. We really need to know what kind of donut it is. Jam filled or toroidal? What glazing?

True, people have hair, black holes don't. Not an appropriate comparison.

Maybe they should have used a sand based analogy. Blackholes are like quicksand while most other things are just like regular sand.

At what point is the intent defined. Do all of the animals out there not just "do what they do"? I can see how the analogy isn't great but I think it's closer than it initially seems

It's an arbitrary line, but you might say that a biological phenomenon such as mountain lion or even sunflower has a different meaning of "do what they do" form a purely physical one such as a black hole, quicksand, or a volcano.

Even if we don't ascribe consciousness to the biological phenomena, they can be said to "seek" certain resources/input and "avoid" others. They actively avoid death and attempt to sustain their processes over generations by consuming specific resources.

A black hole, if offered a red giant or an asteroid, will not respond to either, because it has no sensory input and no preference for growth or evaporation.

I think it is also fair to look at a mountain lion as an essentially chemical/physical process similar to a black hole, but in that case I would say it's hard to declare humans are any different.

I don't know but if something can decide to do or not do something, I'd say that's a start. Blackholes can't decide not to suck everything in to them, there is no intent behind it, no responsibility. It just is what it is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambush_predator

Immediately thought of trapdoor spiders.

From the (in)famous Star Trek fan canon, "The United Federation Of Fuck It Hold My Beer I Got This"[0]:

> Also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.

I guess that's how you do it.

[0] - https://imgur.com/gallery/wpZ4w

Earth is the Texas of the Universe?

Earth Man is Florida Man to everyone off Earth.

Why else would the Space Center be in Houston?

Even more than that, our space missions launch in Florida and are managed in Texas. What we bring to space is Cowboys and Florida man.

There is no depth to how much I love the idea in your screenshot.

If you haven't already, give r/hfy a gander. There's no shortage of stories that can be summed up as, "The human did WHAT?" Plenty of variety, though.

I haven't read many of them, but the Star Trek Starfleet Corps of Engineers novels appear to basically be this.

I'd just like to point out that the whole time travel thing was done in a Klingon bird of prey. The ships are beholden to the whims of the crew, no matter the level of inbuilt space magic.

Interesting to see how anthropomorphic the language about the black hole is, in the first few para's - "...gatherers, not hunters. They lie in wait...sloppily devours...belching...gobbled...".

Vs. the reality is that the the whole process is just as deterministic and conscious-free as water flowing downhill. And after para 3, the article's tone and language change to straight & sober science.

We remember facts better when they are in story form.

For example, suppose I ask 100 people to memorize a list of fifty words, and then I ask you which word was a food item. Many people find this challenging.

If I change the experiment so that I tell a story using all fifty words, and then ask you "what did the grandmother have for breakfast?", you're much more likely to do better.

> We remember facts better when they are in story form...

True, but orthogonal to my point. Outside of myth, fantasy novels, and children's stories, most writing about destructive natural phenomena does not anthropomorphize Mount St. Helens as it erupted, the asteroid which hit the Moon to create Tycho Crater, the solar flare which caused the Carrington Event, etc.

I think you may just not be looking closely enough. Using your first example, here are things Mt. St. Helens is described as doing in just one contemporaneous article:

- roaring

- belching

- "[knocked down] millions of trees [...] like a giant playing pick-up sticks"

- slumbering

- menacing

That all sounds very anthropomorphic to me.

[0] https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/printout/0,8816,924...

Point, though my recollection (not gonna review 1,001 old articles on the eruption, to do stats) is that the anthropomorphic descriptions tended to be in "I was too damn close, and it was very scary" accounts. I won't look down at anthropomorphism in that case - it's likely a good reflection of the author's (or his source's) very human experience and emotional reactions to danger.

"Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!"

No anthropomorphism there.

Right up there with "Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here".

True, but inaccurate stories create false memories. This is just bad writing.

> the reality is that the the whole process is just as deterministic and conscious-free as water flowing downhill

This isn't just an analogy, either...if the material happens to be water, it's _literally_ flowing downhill if it's falling into a black hole.

> Vs. the reality is that the the whole process is just as deterministic and conscious-free as water flowing downhill.

And you think you're so different? Do you have free will? Are you sure you're not just following a deterministic process?

Which sort of "free will"?

If the boring sort, that wanna-be alphas argue endlessly about in Philosophy 507, then "no".

If the sort that real people need to have a sense of, to cope with life in the real world, then "yes". Given ~40 bytes of data about a black hole, its behavior can be predicted, exactly enough for ~all real-world purposes, and for millions of years into the future, by a pretty simple program running on a (say) old Z80 CPU. You can drop a billion empty beer cans into it, one by one, and if you match their trajectories then the outcomes will be ~identical. Humans, or even my sister's stupid pet dog, are nothing remotely resembling that predictable and deterministic.

I really like the idea of quantifying how deterministic a system is by the amount of data need to accurately (for reasonable values of accuracy) predict it's behavior. Objectional tests are terrific for bringing philosophers back into the realm of reason.

sed -I 's/are terrific for bringing philosophers back into/are a reasonable tactic for attempting to drag screaming, kicking, & biting philosophers back into/'

Are you really saying that black holes ARE as deterministic as humans or even wolves?

Where are the real pictures? All I see are the artistic representations?

"Hubble can't photograph the AT2022dsb tidal event's mayhem up close, since the munched-up star is nearly 300 million light-years away at the core of the galaxy ESO 583-G004. But astronomers used Hubble's powerful ultraviolet sensitivity to study the light from the shredded star, which include hydrogen, carbon, and more. The spectroscopy provides forensic clues to the black hole homicide." - TFA

Then the title should've been "Hubble smelled sulfur in the air"

What in the title made you expect to see a photograph

- "Hubble" - i.e. that space telescope that's well-known by general public to shoot photographs.

- "finds a <very specific and visceral description of an extraordinary phenomenon>" - kind of implies you have a little more to go on than a spectrogram and a shipload of PhD-level math used to divine conclusions from it.

Likely a correlation with a telescope that records photons frequently leading to photographs.

It's an immensely visual title in its description.

3 out of the 5 instruments on Hubble are spectroscopes and interferometers and don’t produce pretty pictures. Since this discovery was based on pointing one of those spectroscopes at a transient event spotted in a sky survey there are no pictures.

Hubble has really been showing off some muscle ever since the new guy showed up.

Glad to see the old rig still killing it. One cannot but wonder what the JWST will deliver.

More about these structures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accretion_disk

This isn't an Einstein Ring, where gravitational lensing can make a star look like a donut.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_ring

This is more like a ring galaxy, formation models of which usually involve a fast, dense galaxy smashing through the center of another, leaving behind a compact core and a turbulent, distant ring of active star formation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_galaxy

Ring galaxy is an analogy. Another might be a ring of low pressure around the rapidly rising column of a mushroom cloud.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom_cloud

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_ring

https://youtu.be/zzQGMvIFD9o&t=15s

And alas, this phenomenon does not include any actual donuts... although if there's enough money at the end of the month, your next astronomy department colloquium might feature some, if you arrive early.

The latest "Talk Python To Me" podcast episode features one of the people involved in producing the recent images of the M87 black hole that demonstrate the Einstein ring, in case anyone's interested: https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/398/imaging-black-holes-...

My analogies were wrong: I was thinking of a small (radius) black hole disrupting a star like a bullet shot through an apple.

The Hubble telescope observed a star that had been pulled out into a long stream, that ends in a massive donut around the black hole.

The scale of this thing is huge.

LIGO has detected black holes swallowing neutrons stars. If the black hole is small (~3 solar masses) the neutron star is ripped apart, but if the BH is much larger it's swallowed whole.

https://www.ligo.org/detections/NSBH2020.php

faint sound of topologists all over the world cheering

Additional sound of Tokamak fusion designers joining in the cheering, and saying "See? See?"

Yet no pictures

These accretion discs are always described as emitting extreme amounts of energy, but it is never clear what makes them do this. We know stars convert mass to energy by fusion under extreme pressure and temperature in their cores.

Does this accretion disc have extreme pressure domains where fusion happens? Or is it more like streams of matter being accelerated to collide like a synchrotron, with no pressure and only massed velocity driving nuclei to fuse, a beam striking a target?

Or are we getting extreme pressure via confinement in twisted magnetic fields, like what is attempted in Tokamaks?

And, is the energy coming from fusion at all? Could gravitation alone account for the energy released, without fusion occurring in the disc?

from Foundations of Black Hole Accretion Disk Theory

https://link.springer.com/article/10.12942/lrr-2013-1

> The radiation we receive from quasars and microquasars comes not from the black holes themselves, but instead originates in the accretion disks which surround themFootnote6 (see Figure 1). In these accretion disks, angular momentum is gradually removed by some presumably (although not necessarily [48]) dissipative process, causing matter to spiral down into the black hole, converting its gravitational energy into heat, and then, by various processes, radiating this energy.Footnote7 The radiation subsequently leaks through the disk, escapes from its surface, and travels along trajectories curved (in space) by the strong gravity of the black hole, eventually reaching our telescopes.

So not fusion, the energy is gravitational potential.

It seems implausible, on its face, that the by-far most energetic processes in the universe are driven by the by-far weakest force in the universe. We know that electromagnetic fields are deeply involved in focusing the jet -- beam, really -- coming out. It beggars imagination to insist they can have no further role.

Do we have any reason to believe no fusion is occurring in the process?

Just in case anyone is fooled: the pictures are fake, they are not what Hubble saw. Hubble didn't see that picture. It's just some artist doing his thing. Might as well have been generated by one of the new AIs like MidJourney.

What Hubble actually saw was some ultraviolet data that appears to be of such an event.

They are illustrations, and clearly label as such. At no point they are called “photos of the event”, so I am not sure why they should be called fake.

The first words underneath the picture say:

> This sequence of artist's illustrations…

Hubble can't see data, it obviously captured some light which was analysed and the scientists believe the source is black hole twisting a captured star. Then someone visualised the process that illustrates the event and that's what the pictures are.

Think of it as the investigators reconstructing a crime scene based on the bullet holes and blood found on the scene and a reporter re-enacting what happened based on investigation report.

/super speed

What? Hubble is (among other things) a visible-light telescope. From the wiki page:

> Hubble's orbit outside the distortion of Earth's atmosphere allows it to capture extremely high-resolution images with substantially lower background light than ground-based telescopes. It has recorded some of the most detailed visible light images, allowing a deep view into space.

Unless you want to play semantics about whether a camera “sees” or not, it’s clearly capturing images.

It has a camera plus several other instruments. In this case it seems that the camera could not be used. The article is discussing the interpretation of the spectroscopy data.

> Hubble can't photograph the AT2022dsb tidal event's mayhem up close...

> This energetic collision was close enough to Earth and bright enough for the Hubble astronomers to do ultraviolet spectroscopy over a longer than normal period of time.

You might want to read the actual article instead of running off to wikipedia because Someone Is Wrong On The Internet. Pay particular attention to the part where they go into detail that the discovery was 1) done with a spectrometer, not a camera and 2) it's UV, not visible light. Might temper that knee-jerk some.

Did I say something else?

Where can one see color mapped versions of that UV data?

You probably can't. If such a thing existed, they wouldn't make up some artist-made illustration.

They probably detected the event by plugging in some mathematical equations based on general relativity.

I'd imagine it has something to do with pattern of how pulse changes over time.

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