I'm Not Just Sitting Here Being Lazy . . . I'm Travelling at 1,000,000 Miles Per Hour → Washingtons Blog
I'm Not Just Sitting Here Being Lazy . . . I'm Travelling at 1,000,000 Miles Per Hour - Washingtons Blog

Monday, May 11, 2009

I'm Not Just Sitting Here Being Lazy . . . I'm Travelling at 1,000,000 Miles Per Hour

The "Great Attractor" is a region of space in the Centaurus Supercluster with a mass tens of thousands times greater than our Milky Way galaxy.

This may be a radio wave image of a portion of the center of the Great Attractor (scientists aren't positive they're focusing on the right area):

(see this).

The Great Attractor has such a massive gravitational pull, that it is pulling our entire galaxy and all of the nearby galaxies towards it at the speed of 1,000,000 miles an hour (see this, this and this).

We don't feel any movement because everything on Earth and in our galaxy is moving at the same speed. In other words, we don't feel the movement for the same reason that we don't feel the Earth rotate: everything around us is rotating at the same time.

So don't call me lazy . . . I'm moving at a million miles per hour.

And in other astrophysics news, scientists have just discovered a black hole as large as 18 billion suns. Indeed, scientists say that black holes may get even bigger:

So just how big can these bad boys get? Craig Wheeler of the University of Texas in Austin, US, says it depends only on how long a black hole has been around and how fast it has swallowed matter in order to grow. "There is no theoretical upper limit," he says.

5 comments:

  1. Well,there really is a theoretical upper limit to the size of a black hole: It cant get bigger than all the matter/energy in our universe (and maybe at that limit, a big bang takes place?).

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  2. Have you ever seen a black hole? Check this out and watch "Thunderbolts Of The Gods" Black Holes, like black clothes are just fashionable. (hard to believe, but check the evidence. Luv yr blog...)

    http://www.thunderbolts.info/webnews/112607fallintohole.htm

    The first assumption is that black holes are real, and a black hole exists at the center of every galaxy. In fact, this assumption is so common that most science writers no longer bother to maintain any pretense of journalistic dispassion -- they simply assert that black holes exist and demand that the layman accept it as true. But no one has ever seen a black hole -- it is a mathematical concept invented to account for phenomena at the hearts of galaxies that are "too energetic" in a universe dominated by the pitifully weak force of gravity. The idea that a "nearly infinite compression" of matter (a black hole) can occur ANYWHERE has no experimental support whatever.

    Furthermore, the black hole theory has had an embarrassing to non-existent PREDICTIVE record -- it has been and continues to be tweaked, modified, and overhauled to account for unexpected observations. For example, in its original formulation, magnetic fields had no role at all. But as astronomers with new instruments began to detect pervasive magnetic fields in space, the theorists were forced to redefine the envisioned "black hole activity" to account for them. All the while, they continue to ignore the electric currents on which magnetic fields depend.

    The second assumption is that black holes (which we have no valid reason to believe exist) emit jets of high-speed particles. Since we were told for years that the gravitational force of black holes was too great for ANYTHING to escape, even LIGHT, this idea is particularly ironic. In fact, galaxies have been seen emitting high-energy X-rays and stupendous, filamentary jets across THOUSANDS of light

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  3. Hey pygmy, your ignorance is showing.

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  4. Pygmy, I've never seen an atom or a bacteria, so I guess they don't exist either.

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  5. Easy guys, Pygmy is just voicing a valid opinion which is far more constructive than the anonymous coward above who called him ignorant with zero substantiation.
    The fact is it's all theoretical, sure string theory sets a minimum compression with the Planck length 10 to the power of -43 m but infinities may play a part, after all you can keep dividing a space an infinite amount of times and every time we think we've discovered the elementary particle we discover components.
    Infinities crop up but are renormalised in field equations to be manageable.
    Having said that though, the energy emitted by blackholes could be the stimulation of the quantum vaccuum by the intense gravity, there is an enormous amount of energy in so called 'empty' space that we are not aware of and zero point fluctuations may be just the surface.

    I'm not a physicist and are mostly talking out my black hole but feel free to constructively tear me a new singularity.

    ReplyDelete

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