New analysis performed by Thomas Jens of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany and the University of Texas' Karl Gebhardt has estimated the mass of the black hole as equivalent to 6.4 billion suns, twice the original size it was thought to be. This, according the New Scientist, might be a good thing for science:

M87's black hole, when viewed from Earth, would be the same apparent size as the nearer black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. This puts M87's hole within reach of radio astronomy techniques that measure a black hole directly, by tracing its dark silhouette against the glow of surrounding gas.

I admit, finding out that a unreasonably big black hole is actually twice as unreasonably big as previously thought does strike me as something that isn't a very good thing to discover. However, if nothing else, the last ten words of that last sentence has given me the name of my new prog rock project.

Mega black hole twice as big as we thought [New Scientist]

This galaxy is similar to ours in some ways. Both the Milky Way and NGC 1097 are spiral galaxies, and both have giant black holes at their centers. The one in this image, though, is 100 million times larger than our sun, compared to the Milky Way's central black hole, which is only the size of a few million suns.

Of course, these infra-red images are kind of deceptive, color wise. The image is all infra-red light, but the longer wavelength light is red and the shorter wavelength light is blue. The colorization process makes the ring of stars white and the area immediately surrounding the black hole blue. This is what creates the creepy "Eye of Mordor" effect.

Black Hole Creates Eye in Middle of Cosmic Storm [via LiveScience]

The Technion in Israel developed this "black hole," creating a well into which air flows faster than the speed of sound. That means that any sounds trying to pass through this moving air just can't keep up with the flow of the air into the "hole." Any sound wave in this air is like someone trying to run up the down escalator. But in this case, the down escalator is four times faster than the person can run.

This is achieved by two clouds of atoms (called a Bose-Einstein condensate) cooled to almost absolute zero, with a pool of very low density between them. Atoms can flow very rapidly, pretty much unhindered, into this area of low density at speeds over four times the speed of sound.

The result is a well into which all sound falls and cannot escape. Any sound that passes close enough to the "black hole" essentially ceases to be.

This sonic black hole offers scientists a method for testing their theories about black holes in general. But imagine putting one of these in your car instead of a muffler, or in a rocket. A battalion of armed soldiers equipped with a few devices like this could march anywhere silently. These sonic devices wouldn't just dampen the sound; they would virtually obliterate it. It raises the old question: if a tree falls on the Bose-Einstein condensate sonic black hole, does it make a sound?

Sonic Black Hole Traps Sound Waves via [Discovery News]
A sonic black hole in a density-inverted Bose-Einstein condensate via [arXiv]

New Scientist explains:

Light from stars directly behind the hole is swallowed by the horizon, while light from other stars is merely bent by the black hole's gravity, forming a warped image around the hole . . . [researchers] Hamilton and Polhemus have painted a red grid on the horizon to help visualise it (as the horizon is spherical, the two circles on the grid represent the north and south "poles" of its central black hole). And as you pass one Schwartzschild radius, another artificial visual aid pops up. The white grid that loops around you marks where distant observers would place the horizon – this is where you'd see other people falling in if they followed you through the horizon.

The strangest sight is reserved for your last moments. So close to the centre of the black hole, you feel powerful tidal forces. If you're falling in feet first, gravity at your head is much weaker than at your feet. That would pull a real observer apart, and it also affects the light falling in around you - light from above your head is stretched out and shifted to the red end of the spectrum. Eventually it gets red-shifted into nothingness, so your whole view will be squeezed into a horizontal ring.

The big question that still remains is what happens once you cross that event horizon. Obviously, you'd be ripped apart - but how? The usual rules of physics don't seem to apply, and physicists have speculated that you might enter a state of "total entropy" where many points in space share the same characteristics. Does that mean you'd be in several places at once? That you'd take on the same characteristics of many states of matter simultaneously? Let's just hope that it isn't some sort of 2001 thing where you turn into a floating baby and an old man at the same time.

via New Scientist

This is the farthest, and thus the oldest, water ever seen in the Universe. (Because the light from this quasar took 11.1 billion years to reach Earth, it is 11.1 billion years old.)

Max Planck Institute researcher Violette Impellizzeri discovered the water vapor using spectroscopic analysis - essentially, looking for a radio signal that matches the signature of a water molecule (see image). She found the water in just 14 hours by using a nearby galaxy as a telescopic lens: The galaxy's gravity magnifies the light coming from objects behind it, quadrupling the images of those objects (you can see all four versions of the quasar in the picture) and making their radio signatures easier to analyze. Essentially, she created a gravity lens.

Said Impellizzeri:

Others have tried and failed to find water, and we knew we were looking for a very faint signal, so we thought of using a foreground galaxy like a cosmic magnifying glass to observe at a far greater distance and had to be persistent, and sure enough the line emission of water popped up.

Added co-researcher John McKean:

It is interesting that we found water in the first gravitationally-magnified object we observed from the distant Universe. This suggests that the water molecule may have been much more abundant in the early Universe than first thought, and can be used for further research into supermassive black holes and galaxy evolution at high redshift.

So water may be more common, and more ancient, than we ever imagined. Although this water vapor was part of a cloud of dust around a supermassive black hole at the heart of a quasar, it could also mean that water exists in far more mundane parts of the Universe too. On water planets like Earth, for example.

SOURCE: Max Planck Institute

In the artist's renderings on the right, you can see what the gas would look like as it revolved around the black hole. On the left, you can see what astronomers actually observed: a flare as the gas was sucked into Sagittarius A. At the European Space Agency's Very Large Telescope (VLT), the excitement was intense as they saw the flare begin. Ph.D. student Gunther Witzel said:

At the VLT, as soon as we pointed the telescope at Sagittarius A* we saw it was active, and getting brighter by the minute. We immediately picked up the phone and alerted our colleagues at the APEX telescope.

Macarena García-Marín, also from Cologne, got the call at APEX. She said: As soon as we got the call we were very excited and had to work really fast so as not to lose crucial data from Sagittarius A*. We took over from the regular observations, and were in time to catch the flares.

Working together, teams at both scopes were able to record violently variable infrared emissions, with four major flares from Sagittarius A*.

Astronomers Detect Matter Torn Apart by Black Hole [via ESA]

The 12-issue comic Black Hole centered around teens in the 70s who become mutated and deformed from a sexually transmitted disease that spreads fast and comes from unknown origins. In an interview with MTV, Gaiman revealed why he couldn't work with Fincher:

“Once they got David Fincher on,” Gaiman said, “David explained his process consisted of having over ten drafts, done over and over, and Roger and I were sort of asked if we wanted to, if we were interested in doing that. And we definitely weren’t.”

Gaiman and Avary left the film but left one draft of their script with Fincher. Let's hope he works with it — Gaiman's dreamy writing and Finchers insanity really could have created something interesting on screen out of the brilliant Black Hole source material.

[MTV Splash Page]

Here is a touched-up version of the same galaxy so that the tendrils are more obvious. The image you saw on top shows what would be visible to the naked eye, which is pretty damn cool. So what's this galaxy all about? Explains Phil "Bad Astronomer" Plait:

These tendrils have been a problem for astronomers: they’re very narrow (only a couple of hundred light years wide), have masses a million of times that of the Sun, and should fall apart rapidly (they’re blasting out into hot gas which should disrupt them, they’re massive enough to collapse under their own weight to form stars, and tides from the galaxy itself should shred them). Yet they seem at least semi-stable, lasting for hundreds of millions of years. What holds them together?

Turns out it’s that old standby, magnetism. Recently released Hubble images (like the one above) have given astronomers insight into the structure of these tendrils. Hubble’s hi-res view shows details previously unseen in the tendrils, allowing astronomers a better view and the ability to determine the magnetic strengths needed to hold the tendrils together against the forces that would rend them asunder.

In case you weren't already convinced that this was Cthulhu's home galaxy, that freakish and inexplicable persistence of the tentacles in the face of massive force should confirm it.

R'lyeh! R'lyeh! Actually, come to think of it, R'lyeh would make a great name for this galaxy, don't you think?

The Magnetic Tendrils of NGC 1275 [Bad Astronomy]

The Large Hadron Collider, once operational, will fire beams of protons into each other at energy levels never seen on Earth. We don't really know what will happen when experiments begin (or we wouldn't bother running the experiments), and there are fears that all kinds of weird, hypothetical particles could be created that will devour the planet, or that a small but stable black hole will begin consuming all nearby matter. Steve Giddings, Professor of Physics at UC Santa Barbara, studied the risks. His conclusions:

• The chances of a microscopic black hole forming are impossibly small.
• Cosmic rays smash into particles all the time at very high energies. We probably would have noticed if the universe was being chewed up by an endless torrent of ravenous mini black holes.
• In the incredibly unlikely event that a microscopic black hole forms, it would exist for "a nano-nano-nanosecond." Not long enough to do any damage, in other words.
• Giddings even studied what would happen if a long chain if bizarre events occurred, and a stable micro black hole formed. The result would be...nothing much. Even a stable microscopic black hole would be harmless.

If The Large Hadron Collider Produced A Microscopic Black Hole, It Probably Wouldn't Matter. [Science Daily]

Well, obviously you do. So here you go.

These two images are taken from a high-def virtual tour of the galaxy, thanks to NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which is packed with beautiful images that you can zoom around in just by moving your mouse. It's like the Google maps version of the whole galaxy.

A Glimpse of the Milky Way [official site]