Astronomy.com blog : Daniel Pendick, black holes

Join the pulsar hunters and work from home

Daniel Pendick — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:13:00 GMT

“Wanted: a few hundred thousand computers with a little spare time on their hands.”

That’s the basic job qualification if you (and your personal computer) want to join Einstein@Home, a massive international project that uses donated personal computer time to crunch data for real scientists. The project has been going on for several years. This week, Einstein@Home announced it will begin to analyze data from a new source: the giant radio telescope at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. It’s not too late to get into the action.

Einstein@Home, based at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) — a short drive down I-94 from Astronomy headquarters — and the Albert Einstein Institute (AEI) in Germany, is one of the world’s largest public volunteer distributed computing projects. Some 220,000 people in 209 countries have signed up for the project and donated time on their computers to analyzing data collected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and GEO 600 (in Sarstedt, Germany) for gravitational waves.

Powerful astro-events, like black-hole mergers, should generate ripples in the very fabric of space-time (gravitational waves). Einstein@Home uses the collective number-crunching power of thousands of computers to look for patterns of gravitational waves hiding in data captured by LIGO and GEO 600.

The researchers with Einstein@Home will be searching the Arecibo data for a special type of astronomical odd couple that generates gravitational waves: a spinning neutron star, or pulsar, orbiting a black hole. Both objects spring from the collapse of massive stars.

Previous methods could find such binaries in radio data if they orbited each other every 50 minutes or longer. Using the collective computing power of its volunteers, Einstein@Home will be able to find pairs with orbits as short as 11 minutes.

Many dedicated amateur astronomers contribute to various kinds of research, like the study of variable stars and discovering and tracking asteroids and supernovae. But if stargazing isn’t your thing, here’s a way to do some astronomy by essentially doing nothing.

Well, not exactly. You do have to sign up for Einstein@Home and install some software. The project team expects to spot at least a few new pulsars per year.

To find out how to participate, go to einstein.phys.uwm.edu.

The Milky Way’s center of attention

Daniel Pendick — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 17:29:00 GMT

Did a parent, boyfriend/girlfriend, spouse, supervisor, etc., ever say to you in an argument, “You’re not the center of the universe, you know!”

Well, sorry to disappoint, but you’re not the center of the galaxy either.

That honor belongs to a black hole that weighs between 4,250,000 and 4,370,000 times the Sun’s mass and lies somewhere between 26,028 and 27,169 light-years from Earth.

How do I know? Because German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel and his team at the Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching near Munich recently reported the results of a 16-year study tracking the orbits of 28 speedy stars as they zip around the galactic center. The only object with enough mass to account for the stars’ orbits is a black hole.

We knew that black hole was there, but estimates of its mass and distance varied. In an article I edited last year, I said “3 to 4 million solar masses.” Now we have a nice, solid number for each. Genzel won the prestigious Shaw Prize in Astronomy for 2008 for this research.

Nice, solid numbers make science editors sooooo happy. No longer will awkward phrases like “according to scientists’ best estimate yada yada yada” appear in my work. I can just say “about 27,000 light-years” and “about 4 million solar masses.” In fact, I just did — this morning, as I was putting the final touches on a story mentioning the Spitzer Space Telescope’s discoveries about the Milky Way.

This study appears in the December 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

NASA creates an astro-buzz

Daniel Pendick — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:50:00 GMT

Have NASA astronomers discovered the black hole in the Milky Way’s center where lost socks turn into X rays? Tune in next week to find out. Ute Kraus (Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik)

NASA has found something amazing in our galaxy. Unfortunately, it’s not saying just what it has found — until next week, when it collects enough reporters for a press conference.

Or, if you want it from the horse’s mouth, here is the exciting, taunting first paragraph of a pithy press release from our friends in the national space business:

WASHINGTON — NASA has scheduled a media teleconference Wednesday, May 14, at 1 P.M. EDT, to announce the discovery of an object in our galaxy astronomers have been hunting for more than 50 years. This finding was made by combining data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory with ground-based observations.”

That means I have to wait 5 days before NASA reveals yet another Secret of the Universe. And it better be good. It better be the astronomical equivalent of an X-Box release or a taped conversation between a ranking U.S. Senator and his mistress.

What, oh what, could it be?

My first thought was, “They finally took a picture of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy.” That made sense, especially since Chandra is involved. We commonly see lots of X rays beaming from black holes as gas and other junk spirals in and approaches the speed of light.

But how to know for sure? I did what any professional busy-body in the media would do: I e-mailed unnamed, shadowy sources in the astronomical community to see if they knew what NASA is up to and — more important — if they would be willing to rat out NASA (off the record, of course). I received this response:

Chandra does suggest something energetic, but we already know there is a supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center. I just polled a couple of my X-ray colleagues about what it could be given the clues at hand, but no one had any great idea about what we might have been searching for over the last 50 years. Hard to disentangle the usual press-release hype.

Well, no easy answers, it seems. All I can do is use my imagination. If NASA were to find something hidden somewhere in the galaxy, what would it have to be to justify a week of media build-up hype?

The exoplanet where all of my lost socks go? Perhaps there is a wormhole connecting the lint trap in my dryer to the planet. That would be pretty cool.

Or maybe Jimmy Hoffa? Oh, in case you were born in the 1970s or later, and have no idea what I’m talking about, click THIS LINK.

Oh, I know: They found the black hole that the Mafia threw Jimmy Hoffa into.

All I can say, NASA, is this better be good.