DESY: Cosmic Cloud's Gamma-Ray Heartbeat Puzzles Scientists

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DESY: Cosmic Cloud's Gamma-Ray Heartbeat Puzzles Scientists

Post by bystander » Tue Aug 18, 2020 5:31 pm

Strange Gamma-Ray Heartbeat Puzzles Scientists
Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) | 2020 Aug 17

Cosmic gas cloud blinks in sync with wobbling black hole

Scientists have detected a mysterious gamma-ray heartbeat coming from a cosmic gas cloud. The inconspicuous cloud in the constellation Aquila is beating with the rhythm of a neighbouring precessing black hole, indicating a connection between the two objects ... Just how the black hole powers the cloud's gamma-ray heartbeat over a distance of about 100 light years remains enigmatic.

The research team ... rigorously analysed more than ten years of data from the US space administration NASA's Fermi gamma-ray space telescope, looking at a so-called micro quasar. The system catalogued as SS 433 is located some 15 000 lightyears away in the Milky Way and consists of a giant star with about 30 times the mass of our sun and a black hole with about 10 to 20 solar masses. The two objects are orbiting each other with a period of 13 days, while the black hole sucks matter from the giant star. ...

The precession of the black hole's jets has a period of about 162 days. Meticulous analysis revealed a gamma-ray signal with the same period from a position located relatively far from the micro quasar's jets, which has been labelled as Fermi J1913+0515 by the scientists. It is located at the position of an unremarkable gas enhancement. The consistent periods indicate the gas cloud's emission is powered by the micro quasar. ...

Arecibo Data Help Lead to Discovery of Cosmic "Heartbeat"
Arecibo Observatory | University of Central Florida | 2020 Aug 17

Gamma-Ray Heartbeat Powered by the Microquasar SS 433 ~ Jian Li et al
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Re: DESY: Cosmic Cloud's Gamma-Ray Heartbeat Puzzles Scientists

Post by neufer » Tue Aug 18, 2020 5:45 pm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulk wrote:
<<The Hulk is a green-skinned, hulking and muscular humanoid possessing a vast degree of physical strength, and his alter ego Dr. Bruce Mayfield, a physically weak, socially withdrawn, and emotionally reserved physicist, the two existing as independent personalities and resenting of the other. Following his accidental exposure to gamma rays saving the life of Rick Jones during the detonation of an experimental bomb, Mayfield is physically transformed into the Hulk when subjected to emotional stress, at or against his will, often leading to destructive rampages and conflicts that complicate Mayfield's civilian life. The Hulk's level of strength is normally conveyed as proportionate to his level of anger. Commonly portrayed as a raging savage, the Hulk has been represented with other personalities based on Mayfield's fractured psyche, from a mindless, destructive force, to a brilliant warrior, or genius scientist in his own right.>>
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Re: DESY: Cosmic Cloud's Gamma-Ray Heartbeat Puzzles Scientists

Post by BDanielMayfield » Tue Aug 18, 2020 7:50 pm

I admit to being a being who’s a bit bifurcated, but not like the Hulk. More like a very weak, poor emulator of the so called father of the scientific method, Sir Isaac Newton. (He also had to keep his religious beliefs under raps, due to fear of excommunication.)

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Re: DESY: Cosmic Cloud's Gamma-Ray Heartbeat Puzzles Scientists

Post by neufer » Tue Aug 18, 2020 9:21 pm

BDanielMayfield wrote: Tue Aug 18, 2020 7:50 pm
I admit to being a being who’s a bit bifurcated, but not like the Hulk. More like a very weak, poor emulator of the so called father of the scientific method, Sir Isaac Newton. (He also had to keep his religious beliefs under raps, due to fear of excommunication.)
A Very Mature decision :!:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_and_Delilah_(1949_film) wrote:
<<Samson and Delilah is a 1949 American romantic biblical drama film produced and directed by Cecil B. DeMille and released by Paramount Pictures. Posters of the film can be seen in the opening cinema scene in The War of the Worlds (1953 film). Variety appreciated the film's cast by writing, "Victor Mature fits neatly into the role of the handsome but dumb hulk of muscle. Hedy Lamarr never has been more eye-filling and makes of Delilah a convincing minx." [Born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler (November 9, 1914 – January 19, 2000) Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian-American actress, inventor, and film producer [who] co-invented an early version of frequency-hopping spread spectrum.]>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson wrote:
<<Samson (Hebrew: שִׁמְשׁוֹן‎, Shimshōn‎, "man of the sun") was the last of the judges of the ancient Israelites mentioned in the Book of Judges in the Hebrew Bible. He is sometimes considered to be an Israelite version of the popular Near Eastern folk hero also embodied by the Sumerian Enkidu and the Greek Heracles. Samson was betrayed by his lover Delilah, who ordered a servant to cut his hair while he was sleeping and turned him over to his Philistine enemies, who gouged out his eyes and forced him to grind grain in a mill at Gaza. While there, his hair began to regrow. When the Philistines took Samson into their temple of Dagon, Samson asked to rest against one of the support pillars. After being granted permission, he prayed to God and miraculously recovered his strength, allowing him to bring down the columns, collapsing the temple and killing himself as well as all of the Philistines.>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fomalhaut_b wrote:

<<Fomalhaut b, formally named Dagon, is a confirmed, directly imaged extrasolar object and candidate planet orbiting the A-type main-sequence star Fomalhaut, approximately 25 light-years away in the constellation of Piscis Austrinus. The object was initially announced in 2008 and confirmed as real in 2012 from images taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on the Hubble Space Telescope and has a 1,700-year, highly elliptical orbit. It has a periastron of ~50 AU and an apastron of about ~300 AU. As of May 25, 2013 it is 110 AU from its parent star. The name Dagon (a Semitic deity, often represented as half-man, half-fish) was proposed by Dr. Todd Vaccaro. The true nature of Fomalhaut b is the subject of significant debate. Fomalhaut b was initially identified as one of the first exoplanets to be directly imaged: its detection was attributed to reflected light from circumplanetary material (e.g. a dust ring) and thermal emission from a jovian planet atmosphere. Fomalhaut b has subsequently been described as a low-mass planet whose surrounding dust cloud is entirely responsible for its detection or, most recently, debris from a collision of asteroids instead.>>
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Re: DESY: Cosmic Cloud's Gamma-Ray Heartbeat Puzzles Scientists

Post by MarkBour » Tue Sep 01, 2020 6:36 pm

To the extent that I understand this black hole and companion, they form a system that is redistributing some of the mass. While I assume some of it is captured by the black hole, other mass is progressing from the stellar companion into the jets. It would build up mass on either side of the black hole. The infalling stellar matter would continue to build up the angular momentum in the black hole. I think a lot of research, which may already have been done, could reveal what amount of mass, what kind of particles, and how it eventually ends up distributed.

Surely this same process has happened on a very large and long scale, from the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. By now, it must have tortured and ejected a very large amount of material over the billions of years in its history. Is there a general feeling that this process has contributed to our galactic halo? I don't see any but a passing mention of it in the Wikipedia article at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_halo
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Re: DESY: Cosmic Cloud's Gamma-Ray Heartbeat Puzzles Scientists

Post by neufer » Tue Sep 01, 2020 7:12 pm

MarkBour wrote: Tue Sep 01, 2020 6:36 pm
To the extent that I understand this black hole and companion, they form a system that is redistributing some of the mass. While I assume some of it is captured by the black hole, other mass is progressing from the stellar companion into the jets. It would build up mass on either side of the black hole. The infalling stellar matter would continue to build up the angular momentum in the black hole. I think a lot of research, which may already have been done, could reveal what amount of mass, what kind of particles, and how it eventually ends up distributed.

Surely this same process has happened on a very large and long scale, from the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. By now, it must have tortured and ejected a very large amount of material over the billions of years in its history. Is there a general feeling that this process has contributed to our galactic halo?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_Center#Gamma-_and_X-ray_emitting_Fermi_bubbles wrote:
<<In November 2010, it was announced that two large elliptical lobe structures of energetic plasma, termed "bubbles", which emit gamma- and X-rays, were detected astride the Milky Way galaxy's core. These so-called "Fermi bubbles" extend up to about 25,000 light years above and below the galactic center. The galaxy's diffuse gamma-ray fog hampered prior observations, but the discovery team led by D. Finkbeiner, building on research by G. Dobler, worked around this problem. The 2014 Bruno Rossi Prize went to Tracy Slatyer, Douglas Finkeiner, and Meng Su "for their discovery, in gamma rays, of the large unanticipated Galactic structure called the Fermi bubbles". The origin of the bubbles is being researched. The bubbles are connected and seemingly coupled, via energy transport, to the galactic core by columnar structures of energetic plasma dubbed "chimneys". They were seen in visible light and optical measurements were made for the first time in 2020.>>
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Re: DESY: Cosmic Cloud's Gamma-Ray Heartbeat Puzzles Scientists

Post by neufer » Wed Sep 02, 2020 2:32 pm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_X-1#Jets wrote:
<<Cygnus X-1 (abbreviated Cyg X-1) is a galactic X-ray source in the constellation Cygnus, and the first such source widely accepted to be a black hole. It was discovered in 1964 during a rocket flight and is one of the strongest X-ray sources seen from Earth, producing a peak X-ray flux density of 2,300 Jansky. It remains among the most studied astronomical objects in its class. Cygnus X-1 belongs to a high-mass X-ray binary system, located about 6,070 light-years from the Sun, that includes a blue supergiant variable star designated HDE 226868. The compact object is now estimated to have a mass about 14.8 times the mass of the Sun and has been shown to be too small to be any known kind of normal star, or other likely object besides a black hole. If so, the radius of its event horizon has 300 km "as upper bound to the linear dimension of the source region" of occasional X-ray bursts lasting only for about 1 ms. Cygnus X-1 is about five million years old and formed from a progenitor star that had more than 40 solar masses. The majority of the star's mass was shed, most likely as a stellar wind. If this star had then exploded as a supernova, the resulting force would most likely have ejected the remnant from the system. Hence the star may have instead collapsed directly into a black hole.

The compact object and blue supergiant star form a binary system in which they orbit around their center of mass every 5.599829 days. From the perspective of the Earth, the compact object never goes behind the other star; however, the inclination of the orbital plane to the line of sight from the Earth remains uncertain, with predictions ranging from 27–65°. A 2007 study estimated the inclination is 48.0±6.8°, which would mean that the semi-major axis is about 0.2 AU, or 20% of the distance from the Earth to the Sun. The orbital eccentricity is thought to be only 0.0018±0.002; a nearly circular orbit. A stellar wind from the star provides material for an accretion disk around the X-ray source. Matter in the inner disk is heated to millions of degrees, generating the observed X-rays. A pair of jets, arranged perpendicularly to the disk, are carrying part of the energy of the infalling material away into interstellar space.

As accreted matter falls toward the compact object, it loses gravitational potential energy. Part of this released energy is dissipated by jets of particles, aligned perpendicular to the accretion disk, that flow outward with relativistic velocities. (That is, the particles are moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light.) This pair of jets provide a means for an accretion disk to shed excess energy and angular momentum. They may be created by magnetic fields within the gas that surrounds the compact object.

The Cygnus X-1 jets are inefficient radiators and so release only a small proportion of their energy in the electromagnetic spectrum. That is, they appear "dark". The estimated angle of the jets to the line of sight is 30° and they may be precessing. One of the jets is colliding with a relatively dense part of the interstellar medium (ISM), forming an energized ring that can be detected by its radio emission. This collision appears to be forming a nebula that has been observed in the optical wavelengths. To produce this nebula, the jet must have an estimated average power of 9×1029 W. This is more than 1,000 times the power emitted by the Sun.] There is no corresponding ring in the opposite direction because that jet is facing a lower density region of the ISM.

In 2006, Cygnus X-1 became the first stellar mass black hole found to display evidence of gamma ray emission in the very high energy band, above 100 GeV. The signal was observed at the same time as a flare of hard X-rays, suggesting a link between the events. The X-ray flare may have been produced at the base of the jet while the gamma rays could have been generated where the jet interacts with the stellar wind of HDE 226868.

Cygnus X-1 was the subject of a friendly scientific wager between physicists Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne in 1974, with Hawking betting that it was not a black hole. He conceded the bet in 1990 after observational data had strengthened the case that there was indeed a black hole in the system. This hypothesis lacks direct empirical evidence but has generally been accepted from indirect evidence.>>
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Re: DESY: Cosmic Cloud's Gamma-Ray Heartbeat Puzzles Scientists

Post by BDanielMayfield » Wed Sep 02, 2020 6:01 pm

I fear this is a dumb question, but I'd rather look dumb by asking than to stay dumb by not asking, so ...
This hypothesis lacks direct empirical evidence but has generally been accepted from indirect evidence.
What exactly is the difference between 'direct empirical evidence' and 'indirect evidence'? Perhaps evidence for black holes could serve as examples of both types of such evidence. Help on this will be appreciated.

Bruce
Just as zero is not equal to infinity, everything coming from nothing is illogical.

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Re: DESY: Cosmic Cloud's Gamma-Ray Heartbeat Puzzles Scientists

Post by neufer » Wed Sep 02, 2020 6:54 pm

BDanielMayfield wrote: Wed Sep 02, 2020 6:01 pm
This hypothesis lacks direct empirical evidence but has generally been accepted from indirect evidence.
What exactly is the difference between 'direct empirical evidence' and 'indirect evidence'? Perhaps evidence for black holes could serve as examples of both types of such evidence. Help on this will be appreciated.
Sherlock Holmes-The Sign of Four (1890): ‘How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,however improbable, must be the truth?’

Sherlock Holmes--The Beryl Coronet (May 1892): ‘It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

Sherlock Holmes-The Blanched Soldier (1926): ‘…when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_X-1#Jets wrote:
<<[Cygnus X-1] is now estimated to have a mass about 14.8 times the mass of the Sun and has been shown to be too small to be any known kind of normal star, or other likely object besides a black hole. If so, the radius of its event horizon has 300 km [the Schwarzschild circumference?] "as upper bound to the linear dimension of the source region" of occasional X-ray bursts lasting only for about 1 ms [= 300 km/c].>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorne%E2%80%93Hawking%E2%80%93Preskill_bet wrote:
<<The Thorne–Hawking bet: "This was a form of insurance policy for me. I have done a lot of work on black holes, and it would all be wasted if it turned out that black holes do not exist. But in that case, I would have the consolation of winning my bet, which would win me four years of the magazine Private Eye. If black holes do exist, Kip will get one year of Penthouse. When we made the bet in 1975, we were 80% certain that Cygnus X-1 was a black hole. By now, I would say that we are about 95% certain, but the bet has yet to be settled." — Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (1988)

In the updated and expanded edition of A Brief History of Time, Hawking states, "Although the situation with Cygnus X-1 has not changed much since we made the bet in 1975, there is now so much other observational evidence in favour of black holes that I have conceded the bet. I paid the specified penalty, which was a one year subscription to Penthouse, to the outrage of Kip's liberated wife.">>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it wrote:
<<The phrase "I know it when I see it" is a colloquial expression by which a speaker attempts to categorize an observable fact or event, although the category is subjective or lacks clearly defined parameters. The phrase was used in 1964 by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio. In explaining why the material at issue in the case was not obscene under the Roth test, and therefore was protected speech that could not be censored, Stewart wrote:

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.">>
Art Neuendorffer

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