One-way trip into black hole takes 200,000 years

I find this quite interesting. It seems as each week goes by, science is closer and closer to having another major breakthrough. The next few years will no-doubt bring a huge revelation in the field of science and the organization and formation of the universe.

The one-way journey from the heart of a galaxy into the oblivion of a black hole probably takes about 200,000 years, astronomers said on Monday.

By tracking the death spiral of cosmic gas at the center of a galaxy called NGC1097, scientists figured that material moving at 110,000 miles an hour would still take eons to cross into a black hole.

Black holes are drains in space that have gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. Huge ones are believed to lurk at the centers of many galaxies including the Milky Way, which contains the sun.

“It would take 200,000 years for gas to travel the last leg of its one-way journey,” Kambiz Fathi of Rochester Institute of Technology told reporters at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

No one has ever seen a black hole, but astronomers study the way matter and energy behave around them.

An international team led by Fathi studied the black hole at the middle of NGC1097, a behemoth with 100 million times the mass of the sun.

The team managed to observe behavior 10 times closer to the black hole than ever before, Fathi said, seeing clouds of material within 10 light-years of the galactic core, where the black hole is believed to reside.

Previous research has detected gas clouds from 100 to 1,000 light-years from the galaxy’s heart.

A light-year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year. The galaxy is about 47 million light-years away from Earth, relatively close in cosmic terms. Yahoo! News

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Jesus ‘healed using cannabis’

Jesus was almost certainly a cannabis user and an early proponent of the medicinal properties of the drug, according to a study of scriptural texts published this month. The study suggests that Jesus and his disciples used the drug to carry out miraculous healings.

The anointing oil used by Jesus and his disciples contained an ingredient called kaneh-bosem which has since been identified as cannabis extract, according to an article by Chris Bennett in the drugs magazine, High Times, entitled Was Jesus a Stoner? The incense used by Jesus in ceremonies also contained a cannabis extract, suggests Mr Bennett, who quotes scholars to back his claims.

“There can be little doubt about a role for cannabis in Judaic religion,” Carl Ruck, professor of classical mythology at Boston University said. Read more

Scientists Find A DNA Change That Accounts For White Skin

Scientists said yesterday that they have discovered a tiny genetic mutation that largely explains the first appearance of white skin in humans tens of thousands of years ago, a finding that helps solve one of biology’s most enduring mysteries and illuminates one of humanity’s greatest sources of strife.

The work suggests that the skin-whitening mutation occurred by chance in a single individual after the first human exodus from Africa, when all people were brown-skinned. That person’s offspring apparently thrived as humans moved northward into what is now Europe, helping to give rise to the lightest of the world’s races. Read more

Astronomers detect light of the first stars

A faint glow from the first stars formed after the Big Bang has been detected. The cluster of stars, known as Population III, is believed to have been formed about 100 million years after the dawn of the Universe 13.7 billion years ago, astronomers from Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland said.

The stars are so distant that they cannot be seen directly using telescopes, but their presence has been inferred from glimmers on infra-red radiation. A team led by Alexander Kashlinsky picked out the signature of the cluster from the cosmic infra-red background (CIB), a glow of radiation. The team measured the CIB, and created an image by removing the contributions made by other stars and galaxies. Times Online

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I’m Feeling Lucky

So, I was looking at my mint and noticed that I have been getting a lot of hits from a past article I posted about String Theory Proof. Because I am a stats fiend and like to know everything that is going on with my site, I went to Google to see where I ranked with the search term “string theory proof” (without the quotation marks). I found out, to my great astonishment, that I am number 1. So, if you go to google and seach string theory proof and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky” you will be directed directly to my site. Neat, huh? Does anyone else have any search terms that take people directly to your site?