(08-26-2023, 05:42 PM)kander Wrote: Still, the religious nuts will blame you and CO2 that drives the weather. What an inconvenient discovery.
Neither CO2 nor I drive the weather on Neptune and I really don't care if religious nuts claim otherwise. In the meantime:
"First observations ever of the outskirts of a supermassive black hole's accretion disk"
Astronomers using the Gemini North Observatory have, for the first time, constrained the size of an accretion disk surrounding a supermassive black hole in another galaxy. The mass of the black hole is estimated to be between 400 and 900 million solar masses (cf. the Milky Way's own massive central black hole that has a mass of about four million solar masses). The data suggest the disk's outer radius is about 1/7th of a light year. For reference, gravitationally speaking, the solar system has a radius of about one light-year, so hopefully that gives a picture of how much mass is contained within a very small volume.
"Nothing can evoke an existential perspective-spiral quite like looking at an image of a galaxy. At first glance, these sublime structures may appear rather serene. But in fact the center of many galaxies is a turbulent environment containing an actively feeding supermassive black hole.
Orbiting these incomprehensibly dense objects are swirling accretion disks of gas and dust, which feed the black hole and emit copious amounts of energy all along the electromagnetic spectrum—from high-energy gamma rays and X-rays, through visible light, to infrared and radio waves."
More details at https://phys.org/news/2023-08-outskirts-...etion.html