Kepler Targets Supermassive Black Hole

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Kepler Targets Supermassive Black Hole

An artist’s conception of an active galactic nuclei. Image Credit: NASA / Dana Berry / SkyWorks Digital

With only an introductory course in science, it’s easy to think that scientists strictly follow the scientific method. They propose a new hypothesis, test that hypothesis, and after many years of hard work, either confirm or reject it. But science is often prone to chance. And when a surprise presents itself, the book titled “Scientific Method 101” often gets dropped in the trash. In short, science needs — and perhaps thrives on — stupid luck.

Take any scientific mission. Often designed to do one thing, a mission tends to open up a remarkable window on something unexpected. Now, NASA’s Kepler space telescope, designed to hunt for planets in our own galaxy, has helped measure an object much more distant and more massive than any of its detected planets: a black hole.

KA1858+4850 is a Seyfert galaxy with an active supermassive black hole feeding on nearby gas. It lies between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra approximately 100 million light-years away.

In 2012, Kepler provided a highly accurate light curve of the galaxy. But the team, led by Liuyi Pei from the University of California, Irvine, also relied on ground-based observations to compliment the Kepler data.

The trick is to look at how the galaxy’s light varies over time. The light first emitted from the accretion disk travels some distance before reaching a gas cloud, where it’s absorbed and re-emitted a short time later.

Measuring the time-delay between the two emitted points of light tells the size of the gap between the accretion disk and the gas cloud. And measuring the width of the emitted light from the gas cloud tells the velocity of the gas moving near the black hole (due to an effect known as Doppler broadening). Together, these two measurements allow astronomers to determine the mass of the supermassive black hole.

Pei and his colleagues measured a time delay of roughly 13 days, and a velocity of 770 kilometers per second. This allowed them to calculate a central black hole mass of roughly 8.06 million times the mass of the Sun.

The results have been published in the Astrophysical Journal and are available online.

About Shannon Hall

Shannon Hall is a freelance science journalist. She holds two B.A.'s from Whitman College in physics-astronomy and philosophy, and an M.S. in astronomy from the University of Wyoming. Currently, she is working toward a second M.S. from NYU's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting program. You can follow her on Twitter @ShannonWHall.

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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the United States government agency responsible for the civilian space program as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958 with a distinctly civilian (rather than military) orientation encouraging peaceful applications in space science. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed on July 29, 1958, disestablishing NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The new agency became operational on October 1, 1958.

UFO SIGHTINGS PHOTO PHOTOGRAPHY

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a UFO as "An unidentified flying object; a 'flying saucer'." The first published book to use the word was authored by Donald E. Keyhoe. The acronym "UFO" was coined by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, who headed Project Blue Book, then the USAF's official investigation of UFOs. He wrote, "Obviously the term 'flying saucer' is misleading when applied to objects of every conceivable shape and performance. For this reason the military prefers the more general, if less colorful, name: unidentified flying objects. UFO (pronounced Yoo-foe) for short." Other phrases that were used officially and that predate the UFO acronym include "flying flapjack", "flying disc", "unexplained flying discs", "unidentifiable object", and "flying saucer". The phrase "flying saucer" had gained widespread attention after the summer of 1947. On June 24, a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier. Arnold timed the sighting and estimated the speed of discs to be over 1,200 mph (1,931 km/h). At the time, he described the objects' shape as being somewhat disc-like or saucer-like, leading to newspaper accounts of "flying saucers" and "flying discs". In popular usage the term UFO came to be used to refer to claims of alien spacecraft. and because of the public and media ridicule associated with the topic, some investigators prefer to use such terms as unidentified aerial phenomenon (or UAP) or anomalous phenomena, as in the title of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP).

UFO PHOTO PHOTOGRAPHY

UFO - Unidentified Flying Object An unidentified flying object, or UFO, in its most general definition, is any apparent anomaly in the sky that is not identifiable as a known object or phenomenon. Culturally, UFOs are associated with claims of visitation by extraterrestrial life or government-related conspiracy theories, and have become popular subjects in fiction. While UFOs are often later identified, sometimes identification may not be possible owing to the usually low quality of evidence related to UFO sightings (generally anecdotal evidence and eyewitness accounts). Stories of fantastical celestial apparitions have been told since antiquity, but the term "UFO" (or "UFOB") was officially created in 1953 by the United States Air Force (USAF) to serve as a catch-all for all such reports. In its initial definition, the USAF stated that a "UFOB" was "any airborne object which by performance, aerodynamic characteristics, or unusual features, does not conform to any presently known aircraft or missile type, or which cannot be positively identified as a familiar object." Accordingly, the term was initially restricted to that fraction of cases which remained unidentified after investigation, as the USAF was interested in potential national security reasons and/or "technical aspects" (see Air Force Regulation 200-2). During the late 1940s and through the 1950s, UFOs were often referred to popularly as "flying saucers" or "flying discs". The term UFO became more widespread during the 1950s, at first in technical literature, but later in popular use. UFOs garnered considerable interest during the Cold War, an era associated with a heightened concern for national security. Various studies have concluded that the phenomenon does not represent a threat to national security nor does it contain anything worthy of scientific pursuit (e.g., 1951 Flying Saucer Working Party, 1953 CIA Robertson Panel, USAF Project Blue Book, Condon Committee).

Photos of Nature | Nature Photography What is The Universe

Photos of Nature | Nature Photography What is The Universe

Wednesday, January 7, 2015