Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Physics Forum Closer To The Edge Of A Black Hole

NASA scientists and their international partners using the new Japanese Suzaku satellite have collected a startling new set of black hole observations, revealing details of twisted space and warped time never before seen with such precision.

The observations include clocking the speed of a black hole's spin rate and measuring the angle at which matter pours into the void, as well as evidence for a wall of X-ray light pulled back and flattened by gravity.

The findings rely on a special feature in the light emitted close to the black hole, called the "broad iron K line," once doubted by some scientists because of poor resolution in earlier observations, now unambiguously revealed as a true measure of a black hole's crushing gravitational force. This technique can be exploited in future X-ray missions.

For more:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/10/061011121453.htm

Cool; I liked the quote -said Reeves, "Only by probing the extremes of gravity will we find flaws, if any, in Einstein's theories." Good science, but mabey not the 'only' way.~

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0609417
Deeply relativistic neutron star binaries

GR's predictions are golden. Are two of its founding postulates nevertheless sour? A theory can be falsified without its ever having made a bad prediction,

http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/lajos.htm

Euclid's Parallel Postulate is similary weak. It fell to hyperbolic and elliptic geometries, then all of them to Thurston's eight primary geometries in three-space,

WP Thurston, "Three-dimensional geometry and topology," Vol. 1. Princeton Mathematical Press, Princeton, NJ, 1997.

Euclid is a special case, perhaps also GR. Academia won't look.

Of course, binaries! Thanks for the example. I'd also remembered reading about the Pioneer anomoly as a possible violation of GR. 8+3=11! Thanks, I might just have to check Thurston out. Chapter 2, Hyperbolic Geometry and Its Friends, looks like fun.