There's a great Nova on tonight.. Monster of the Milky Way

[tridim]

It's about the giant black holes at the center of galaxies. The graphics are stunning tonight.

It's on PBS, check your local listings.

[tinfoilinfor2005]

1. Our PBS on satellite has something entirely different on.

Damn...would love to see it...

[Octafish]

2. In Astronomy 201, I proposed black holes at the center of galaxies in 1978...

...The professor made light of my suggestion.

In fact, he and the class laughed me out of a career in astronomy.

Never lost my interest in space, the cosmos, the multiverse or whatever it is, though.



Thanks for the heads-up, tridim! Look forward to seeing PBS Nova.

[amitten]

5. Scientific types have a great way of ignoring the obvious.

Can't see the forest for the trees.

[Orsino]

9. Thanks a LOT.

Now what are you gonna do about the damned thing? Just leave it for our grandchildren to fix?

[kedrys]

3. Saw something similar on one of the DiscoLearning Channels last week

What really baked my noodle was the mention that the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy is the size of a grain of sand.

When the narrator said it, it made perfect sense, but I'd never really thought about it until then. I always thought it'd be, well, bigger.

Astrophysics is *cool*. :D

[pokerfan]

6. Grain of sand?

Usually the diameter is based on the event horizon and for the milky way, it's often given as something roughly the size of a solar system. But the black hole itself is a singularity and has no dimension.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/051102_black_hole.html

[sakabatou]

4. Already saw a similar program on it

[pinniped]

7. One of the best Nova episodes was "Mystery of the Megaflood"

I plan on exploring the Channeled Scablands this summer.

[pokerfan]

10. That's near where I live!

I have a bunch of books on the subject and could bore you to tears on the topic.

You definitely want to see:
Grand Coulee Dam
Banks Lake
Dry Falls is a must see
Palouse Falls
The Clark Fork where it enters Lake Pend Oreille.

If you have time, try to make it over to Missoula where you can see the shore lines of the ancient glacial lake.

[tridim]

8. My favorite part was the venting..

They postulate that black holes vent to keep the size of galaxies small and equally distributed. Otherwise galaxies would collide with each other too often and grow so big that they would tip the balance and eat up more and more galaxies. The venting also sanitizes the space around the forming galaxy by "blowing away" extraneous matter in the vicinity.

The more we understand nature, the more amazing it becomes. It almost seems like these black holes are the central building block of a living system, much like stem cells.

[Deja Q]

11. So it's not Orion with his big sword then?

:(