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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday May 02 2020, @02:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the no-hair-theory dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

[...] in 2018, a group of scientists led by Lankeswar Dey, a graduate student at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India, published a paper with an even more detailed model they claimed would be able to predict the timing of future flares to within four hours. In a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, those scientists report that their accurate prediction of a flare that occurred on July 31, 2019, confirms the model is correct.

The observation of that flare almost didn't happen. Because OJ 287 was on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth, out of view of all telescopes on the ground and in Earth orbit, the black hole wouldn't come back into view of those telescopes until early September, long after the flare had faded. But the system was within view of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which the agency retired in January 2020.

After 16 years of operations, the spacecraft's orbit had placed it 158 million miles (254 million kilometers) from Earth, or more than 600 times the distance between Earth and the Moon. From this vantage point, Spitzer could observe the system from July 31 (the same day the flare was expected to appear) to early September, when OJ 287 would become observable to telescopes on Earth.

"When I first checked the visibility of OJ 287, I was shocked to find that it became visible to Spitzer right on the day when the next flare was predicted to occur," said Seppo Laine, an associate staff scientist at Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California, who oversaw Spitzer's observations of the system. "It was extremely fortunate that we would be able to capture the peak of this flare with Spitzer, because no other human-made instruments were capable of achieving this feat at that specific point in time."

There is a nice depiction of several disk crossings on YouTube.

Also at: Dancing black holes create mega flare brighter than one trillion stars

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday May 03 2020, @01:37AM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday May 03 2020, @01:37AM (#989665) Journal

    It's a good thought, and it brings to mind the NRO origin of WFIRST [wikipedia.org]. But the spy equipment that is already in orbit is probably not as useful for astronomy.

    The cost targets should be a lot lower. $100 million or less for better-and-larger-than-Hubble, including launch cost. Then you can spam 100 of them for the cost of a single JWST debacle.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2020, @03:06AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2020, @03:06AM (#989685)

    You can indeed get pretty good costs on these if you pull the numbers out of your backside.