I suggest the purpose of these three studies released yesterday, appear to imply interest in the action of venturing funnels of charged particles, often referred to as Active Galactic Nuclei or (AGN), heading into our solar systems path. Such an event could cause serious damage to Earth’s ozone layer, which protects us from harmful radiation.
There is good reason to be concerned of a stream of charged particles produced by a gamma ray burst, supernova, quasar or galactic center black hole AGN. Why? Because it has happened before in near history and no doubt some number of times over vast history. The last event occurred in the year 774-775 A.D.
In this 2012 discovery, scientist Fusa Miyake announced the detection of high levels of the isotope Carbon-14 and Beryllium-10 in tree rings formed in 775 AD, suggesting that a burst of radiation struck the Earth in the year 774 or 775. Carbon-14 and Beryllium-10 form when radiation from space collides with nitrogen atoms, which then decay to these heavier forms of carbon and beryllium.
Lead researcher Dr Ralph Neuhӓuser at Astrophysics Institute of the University of Jena in Germany said: “If the gamma ray burst had been much closer to the Earth it would have caused significant harm to the biosphere. But even thousands of light years away, a similar event today could cause havoc with the sensitive electronic systems that advanced societies have come to depend on. The challenge now is to establish how rare such Carbon-14 spikes are i.e. how often such radiation bursts hit the Earth. In the last 3000 years, the maximum age of trees alive today, only one such event appears to have taken place.”
New study published July 1st 2016 – Scientists from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, and the National Research University Higher School of Economics have devised a method of distinguishing black holes from compact massive objects that are externally indistinguishable from one another. The method involves studying the energy spectrum of particles moving in the vicinity — in one case it will be continuous and in the other it will be discrete. The findings have been published in Physical Review D.
Black holes, which were predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, have an event horizon — a boundary beyond which nothing, even light, can return to the outside world. The radius of this boundary is called the Schwarzschild radius, in physical terms it is the radius of an object for which the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light, which means that nothing is able to overcome its gravity.
Astrophysicists have not yet been able to “see” a black hole directly, but there are many objects that are “suspected” of being black holes. Most scientists are sure that in the center of our galaxy there is a supermassive black hole; there are binary systems where one of the components is most likely a black hole. However, some astrophysicists believe that there may be compact massive objects that fall very slightly short of black hole status; their range is only a little larger than the Schwarzschild radius. It may be the case that some of the “suspects” are in fact objects such as these. From the outside, however, they are not distinguishable from black holes.
“We examined the scalar quantum field around a black hole and a compact object and found that around the collapsing object – it is a black hole; explains FedorPopov, of Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), there are no bound states, but around the compact object there are.”
Second article published July 1st 2016 – Some galaxies pump out vast amounts of energy from a very small volume of space, typically not much bigger than our own solar system. The cores of these galaxies, so called Active Galactic Nuclei or AGNs, are often hundreds of millions or even billions of light years away, so are difficult to study in any detail. Natural gravitational ‘microlenses’ can provide a way to probe these objects, and now a team of astronomers have seen hints of the extreme AGN brightness changes that hint at their presence.
The energy output of an AGN is often equivalent to that of a whole galaxy of stars. This is an output so intense that most astronomers believe only gas falling in towards a supermassive black hole – an object with many millions of times the mass of the Sun – can generate it. As the gas spirals towards the black hole it speeds up and forms a disc, which heats up and releases energy before the gas meets its demise.
A research team from the University of Edinburgh, explain if a planet or star in an intervening galaxy passes directly between the Earth and a more distant AGN, over a few years or so they act as a lens, focusing and intensifying the signal coming from near the black hole. This type of lensing, due to a single star, is termed microlensing. As the lensing object travels across the AGN, emitting regions are amplified to an extent that depends on their size, providing astronomers with valuable clues.
There are expected to be fewer than 100 active AGN microlensing events on the sky at any one time, but only some will be at or near their peak brightness. The big hope for the future is the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), a project the UK recently joined. From 2019 on, it will survey half the sky every few days, so has the potential to watch the characteristic changes in the appearance of the AGNs as the lensing events take place.
Third study published July 1st 2016 – A study of gravitationally lensed images of four mini-jets of material ejected from a central supermassive black hole has revealed the structure of these distant galaxies in unprecedented detail. This has enabled astronomers to trace particle emissions to a very small region at the heart of the quasars, and helped to solve a 50-year-old puzzle about their source. The results will be presented by Dr Neal Jackson at the National Astronomy Meeting in Nottingham on Friday, 1st July.
“In radio-loud quasars, the intense radio emission clearly comes from vast jets of material blasted out from the region around a central black hole. By contrast, the radio emission from radio-quiet quasars is extremely feeble and difficult to see, so it has been hard to identify its source,” explained Jackson of the Jodrell Bank Center for Astrophysics in Manchester. “To study most radio-quiet quasars, we will have to wait until future extremely large telescopes, like the Square Kilometer Array, come online. However, if we find radio-quiet quasars which are lensed by galaxies in front of them, we can use the increased brightness to be able to study them with today’s radio telescopes.”
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