Conspiracy Theory: Planet X/Niburu

[Kuya]

Hey Woozie, how exactly does one calculate the mass of a black hole anyway?

Usually by measuring it's gravitational effects on the object around it. If an object is in orbit or is at least heavily influenced by the gravitational pull of a black hole, simple laws of gravity can be used to estimate its mass.

Is this something that can only be applied to phenomena with powerfull gravitational pulls? Also, within this question, i'd just like to confirm, it is true that all objects possess gravity of their own, correct?

[Maguspk]

Hey Woozie, how exactly does one calculate the mass of a black hole anyway?

Usually by measuring it's gravitational effects on the object around it. If an object is in orbit or is at least heavily influenced by the gravitational pull of a black hole, simple laws of gravity can be used to estimate its mass.

Is this something that can only be applied to phenomena with powerfull gravitational pulls? Also, within this question, i'd just like to confirm, it is true that all objects possess gravity of their own, correct?

Gravity is the effect of one mass on another based on their distance apart I think so while theoretically all masses may experience some sort of minute gravity, you need at least two masses within a distance that gravity can be observed in, I think?

[Max™]

A black hole is natures censorship bureau.

That bit posted a few posts up about how the opposite of a black hole would be an expanding body with great mass is a very good observation, minus the infinite part.

Welcome to Information Theory for Laymen!

More or less a subset of holographic theories of reality, Information theory postulates that our 3 Dimensional Universe is a projection on a higher dimensional substrate, which is why it appears to have 4 Dimensions, in a sense (imagine a 3-D movie projected on a wall, the wall is actually a 4 Dimensional object, and the movie is actually 2-Dimensional, but the information portrayed gives the illusion of 3 Dimensions) the whole Universe could be a hologram.

An interesting thought process leading from this is that the information describing an object, more or less IS the object, again in a sense.

Insert some info about how there is a minimum "bit" size in the Universe, below which one can no longer subdivide matter/data. If you compress something too much, you get a universal censorship bar, or an event horizon, which is standing in for the missing information.

Where is this going? The surface area of an event horizon appears to be directly correlated too it's mass, if you add something to a black hole, it seems doesn't increase in size as a normal conglomeration of mass would, instead it seems as if the new material gets smushed into the horizon itself. Kind of like blowing up a balloon, instead of building a larger ball.

Mind, this is all ridiculously theoretical, but a fun twist happens when you model a black hole as a projection on what is called a 5-D De Sitter space, and then produce a counterpart of it on a 5-D Anti De Sitter space.

The Anti De Sitter counterpart appears as a rapidly expanding mass of energetic particles, almost like a big bang.

Now, why did I call event horizons Censors? Because it appears as though if you were to remove the Universe from around a black hole, you would get a big bang type event.

One Universe opening up inside of another one would be a rather catastrophic event, so a Black Hole can be thought of as a defense mechanism.

In theory you could let a Black Hole decay slowly, and it would be fairly harmless to the parent Universe. If you let the parent Universe decay instead, what does the now naked Black Hole interior do?

/random ass hyper theoretical derail off

There is no way that there could possibly be another star in the solar system, they dynamics of the suns movement, the movement of the planets in space, of space probes, our motion through the galaxy, all of those would show not only the influence of another star, but give away it's mass and location.

You can measure a black holes mass but determining the degree to which it distorts light that passes around it, and the speed at which objects near it are moving.

Supermassive black holes were located because the center of many galaxies have clusters of stars whipping around at ridiculous velocities, with apparently nothing to cause such motions.

The top series of pictures is closer to what it would look like for a luminous body being obscured by a black hole, though in theory if the alignment were better, and it were a few stellar mass hole, it would be a much more pronounced distortion.

[Aerin]

Hey Woozie, how exactly does one calculate the mass of a black hole anyway?

Usually by measuring it's gravitational effects on the object around it. If an object is in orbit or is at least heavily influenced by the gravitational pull of a black hole, simple laws of gravity can be used to estimate its mass.

Is this something that can only be applied to phenomena with powerfull gravitational pulls? Also, within this question, i'd just like to confirm, it is true that all objects possess gravity of their own, correct?

Gravity is the effect of one mass on another based on their distance apart I think so while theoretically all masses may experience some sort of minute gravity, you need at least two masses within a distance that gravity can be observed in, I think?

Pretty sure that's spot on. But don't they think gravity is caused by "gravitons" which we can't really see? I thought there was a particle accelerator somewhere devoted to smashing particles together, for the possibility of seeing said graviton come out of the collision.

[Tajin]

Graviton "theory" is quite recent though, I remember something about it less than a year ago or less.

[Khamsin]

If you break down a mass into it's smallest possible particles (whatever they may be), could the gravity of the whole mass be represented by the effect of gravity of each individual particle acting on each other? i.e. could you quantize the mass into a trillion billion units each with a fixed amount of gravititational pull, do some calculations on the entire system and come up with the same overall effect as the simplified overall mass/distance calculation?

And what do they think these gravitons are physically doing? Leaving the object, finding another object, and giving it a tug? If gravitons are proven to exist, could a method be developed to block them like you can with everything else?

[Kuya]

Hey Woozie, how exactly does one calculate the mass of a black hole anyway?

Usually by measuring it's gravitational effects on the object around it. If an object is in orbit or is at least heavily influenced by the gravitational pull of a black hole, simple laws of gravity can be used to estimate its mass.

Is this something that can only be applied to phenomena with powerfull gravitational pulls? Also, within this question, i'd just like to confirm, it is true that all objects possess gravity of their own, correct?

Gravity is the effect of one mass on another based on their distance apart I think so while theoretically all masses may experience some sort of minute gravity, you need at least two masses within a distance that gravity can be observed in, I think?

Pretty sure that's spot on. But don't they think gravity is caused by "gravitons" which we can't really see? I thought there was a particle accelerator somewhere devoted to smashing particles together, for the possibility of seeing said graviton come out of the collision.

http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/9...aviton1ia8.jpg
And how.

[Max™]

All objects have mass, and are tied together.

Everything was smushed together at the moment of the big bang, it was all in contact, and then as space expanded, it all spread apart to the inflated distances it is at now.

The matter composing your body, the virgo supercluster, the moon, and the lamp on my desk were all roughly in contact when the universe was bare slivers of a moment old.

You can feel all of the rest of the universe tugging at you, believe it or not.

Assuming you have a chair that can spin around, push it away from your desk some (take note of how hard you had to push, btw) and set yourself spinning with your arms crossed in front of you, now put your arms out at shoulder height (again, watch for clearance), and then pull them back in.

The changes in speed, the resistance it took to pull your arms in, and the force keeping you spinning, all comes from the mass of the rest of the universe tugging at you.

Imagine a universe where everything is briefly in perfect balance, then push one little bit of it, the rest of it is going to resist this motion, because it's all tied together.

Now think back to Newton, an object at rest tends to stay at rest, an object in motion tends to stay in motion. When you impart energy to an object and set it moving, it achieves a new balance with the rest of the mass of the Universe, and until acted on by another outside force, will continue on that path.

Inertia!

We have to factor in friction, the Earth's overwhelming gravity, and such. Out in flatter spacetime though, an object will appear to just happily fly away from you forever if you push it... course you'll fly back too, both motions relative to your masses.

Now apply this across the whole of the Universe, and you get the gist of Einstein's point. An enclosed box accelerating at a sufficient rate to keep you against it's floor with 1 Earth Gravity, is indistinguishable from a box sitting on the Earth.

[Delta_9]

tl;dr watch The Elegant Universe

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... &plindex=1

[Max™]

Regarding the question about cutting an object up into a trillion billion pieces or whatever, there is an actual minimum size to which you can subdivide matter apparently, this becomes clear when you consider entropy.

An object has entropy equal to the sum of the entropy of it's component parts.

If you could subdivide an object infinitely, it would have infinite entropy.

... but yes, if you divide something up, the mass of all it's parts is roughly equal to the mass of the whole object. Humans and most other objects are mostly empty space. Electron clouds are HUGE relative to atomic nuclei, and chemical compounds/reactions/molecules are based on electron cloud interactions.

The mass is largely contained within the nuclei though.

I can't remember the exact reference, but I remember reading that if you took all of the quarks composing a human being, and had some way to squeeze all the space out of them, along with collapsing the electron clouds, a human being wouldn't take up as space as the period at the end of this sentence.

[Maguspk]

actually momentum in a spinning chair would happen on the moon exactly the same. It's conservation of momentum, inertia isn't dependant on gravity. A better example is a top momentarily spinning and then falling over, gravity caused it to fall, not to spin lol.

The only part gravity plays in you spinning in any chair, ever is the friction as a result of the normal force due to your weight on the chair. In this case in a weightless situation you'd spin forever, at exactly the same speed you would on earth, but you'd never come to a stop because friction wouldn't be acting on it.

[Jer]

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be seeing here. Are these depictions of an object (or photon) moving through the black hole?

It's a depiction of an object moving behind a black hole. i.e.

(object) ------- (hole) ------- (observer)

Would the observer see it like the top row (bent around the hole), or bottom row (just like going behind any other object)?

Imagine the black hole is the moon, and the star is the sun. He wants to know if a star passing behind the black hole would leave the halo that we see during solar eclipse, or will just not see it while it passes behind. I think.

[Maguspk]

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be seeing here. Are these depictions of an object (or photon) moving through the black hole?

It's a depiction of an object moving behind a black hole. i.e.

(object) ------- (hole) ------- (observer)

Would the observer see it like the top row (bent around the hole), or bottom row (just like going behind any other object)?

Imagine the black hole is the moon, and the star is the sun. He wants to know if a star passing behind the black hole would leave the halo that we see during solar eclipse, or will just not see it while it passes behind. I think.

Considering how fast a black hole must rotate due to it's size and large mass (being shrunken down speeds up it's rotational velocity) I'd guess it'd likely pass by so quickly it'd absorb most of the photons you'd see during it being in front of that star, right?

[Tajin]

In this case in a weightless situation you'd spin forever, at exactly the same speed you would on earth, but you'd never come to a stop because friction wouldn't be acting on it.

Would not the surrounding air eventually stop you too?

[Max™]

You would see a (possibly spectacular, I'd love to see this modeled in 3-D) distortion of the sun, and should be able to make out the disc of the hole with good instruments, assuming it was decent sized.

Also: the spinning chair would happen even in outer space, away from any local gravity wells, but the inertia from the chair couldn't be distinguished from the gravity of a suitably large mass rotating about you and tugging at you as it spun. It is gravity, just not how we normally think about it.

The force keeping a top spinning is the inertial drag from the rest of the mass of the Universe helping keep it balanced, and letting it resist the gravitational tug from the Earth, until friction slows it down and it falls.

Relativity ftw, you can say the top is spinning, or you can say the universe is rotating around the top.

[Khamsin]

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be seeing here. Are these depictions of an object (or photon) moving through the black hole?

It's a depiction of an object moving behind a black hole. i.e.

(object) ------- (hole) ------- (observer)

Would the observer see it like the top row (bent around the hole), or bottom row (just like going behind any other object)?

Imagine the black hole is the moon, and the star is the sun. He wants to know if a star passing behind the black hole would leave the halo that we see during solar eclipse, or will just not see it while it passes behind. I think.

Except I don't mean a halo in that sense, the object doesn't have to be self-illuminated. I just mean the distortion of light around the black hole, if any. Like a fun house mirror. The idea being that, regardless of where the object is behind the black hole, the observer can see all of it. Not just a halo or the tip of it, but the entire object. Only, being distorted into a ring shape around the black hole when it is exactly behind it. The ring shape would represent the entire object, hiding nothing, however it would be severely distorted.

[Melios]

I sincerely hope that everyone who believes the world is over in 2012 just commits mass suicide, I hate this shit.

Nope, they're an unstoppable force. Neither rain, nor hail, nor sleet, nor meteors/nuclear war/planetX/Canada can stop them. I'm betting once 2013 hits a new "doomsday" will be predicted.

This has been going on since at least the days of the Roman Empire, given how all the oppressed Christians thought they were living during the End Times. It probably went on long before that.

I personally think doomsday prophecies are just a reaction to stress and displacement, and gets amplified into these "predictions" by overactive imaginations, not taking medications, taking the wrong medications, illness, neurological disorders, or (head) injuries.

[Kaylia]

The first thing an astronomer do when he find out something is call everyone. Something as big as a star, even a dwarf one would have been made public the second it was found. That conspiracy theory is just retarded.

I'm not 100% sure about this, but I would think that if a very luminous body (light a bright star) was behind a black hole, at least some of the light would be going at the right angle to get bent around the black hole and reach us.

Gravitational lens...yeah. It doesnt make sense for a star to be static behind a black hole too, the system wouldn't be stable.

Hey Woozie, how exactly does one calculate the mass of a black hole anyway?

You could use Newton physics to determine its mass. Knowing the speed of rotation of something in orbit around a black hole (before horizon), you could calculate its masses the same way you calculate moon/earth masses. Of course, it's not as easy in space since you don't have a sun or something rotating around it, but there is nothing special about black hole masses.
I'm not certain of the maths, but it involves x-ray emission and the rotation speed. There is probably many other methods too.

[Max™]

X-ray emission from agitated matter falling into a black hole can help determine the mass, and supermassive black holes feeding and giving off ridiculously huge emissions in this manner is the leading explanation for Quasars, as I recall.

Going a little deeper into that, the amount and energy of the X-rays can apparently indicate how quickly mass is falling into the hole, and other such things. It's all very indirect observation, for good reason.

[evilbau]

Mayan civilization couldn't solve the Y2k12 bug, lucky they didn't last that long.