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Oppenheimer and co-workers demonstrated (via a highly simplified mathematical model) that black holes could be a possibility, Einstein and Eddington both vigorously rejected that concept. At the time, Einstein had a God-like status among physicists while Eddington had a similar status among astronomers, possibly attributable to his claim that only two people in the world understood relativity and Einstein was the other. To go against either of these demigods was akin to denying God himself.
Is a black hole devoid of heat? Nobody knows the answer. Matter entering black holes is accelerating under the influence of enormous gravitational forces and is assumed to carry on to a Schwarzchild singularity, a dimensionless point at the hole's center where the laws of physics are assumed to breakdown. However, all agree that heat cannot escape from a blackhole, so even a pinpoint-size black hole could not be used to heat the household hearth. Actually it would extract heat from the home so, for all practical purposes, we can consider black holes to be dead cold.
That brings us to "collisions among the dead giants of space"--colliding black holes? If it were not for quasars, we would not know that such was a realistic possibility. Quasar stands for "quasistellar radio source." The original quasar was an extremely powerful radiosource discovered in Australia in 1962. After plotting its position, details were sent to the Mount Palomar Observatory where its optical spectrum revealed only a hydrogen spectrum and a location about 2 billion light-years from earth. "Quasar" was a misnomer as these bodies radiate over the full range of the spectrum and now are more often known as quasar stellar objects--QSO's.
Since the repair job on the Hubble telescope, new work has revealed that a "typical" QSO is embedded in a host galaxy which, in turn, is surrounded by a fuzzy halo and about three quarters of them are either colliding with or swallowing other galaxies. The most likely explanation for the observations is that a very high proportion of galaxies have a black hole at their center. The QSO characteristics are due to the black hole swallowing stars that then provide for their enormous energy output.
A recent survey of nearby galaxies indicates that 11 of 27 may harbor a black hole. It would seem, at least to me, that if both partners of colliding galaxies have black holes then, sooner or later, in some collisions the gravitational fields of the two black holes would overlap to the point that their collision became inevitable, perhaps with fusion, a doubling of mass and a rain of in-falling stars consequent upon the increased gravitational field--a hyperquasar maybe!!
Many quasars shoot out jets in opposite directions that may extend for more than a million light years. One explanation for the jets is that a giant spinning black hole accumulates a spinning accretion disk in its equatorial plane from materials being drawn towards it by gravity. Friction and gravity supply the energy necessary to heat the disk to the point where a gas plasma forms and slides inwards along magnetic fields lines later to be hurled out by centrifugal forces as two jets in opposite directions.
The accretion disk is the major source of radiation--X-rays at its hot, innermost regions, and ultra-violet, visible, and infra-red radiation further out. Radio frequency emitting lobes may form where a quasar's jets terminate. Geoffrey Burbidge calculated that these lobes may have as much magnetic and kinetic energy as would be obtained by converting all the mass of ten million suns into pure energy.
Burbidge's calculation demonstrates that The Urantia Book's statement, "in these collisional episodes enormous masses of matter are suddenly converted into the rarest form of energy" is not just the wild imagination it would have appeared to be at the time of the printing of the book..
Some might argue that colliding black holes would simply result in bigger black holes. But perhaps a critical situation is reached when temperature and pressure conditions cause matter to disrupt yielding the constituent ultimatons (which, we are told, do not respond to linear gravity). Such an event might then convert gravitational implosion to rebound explosion. Once the fireworks are over, the revelators tell us that such devastating collisions become a thing of the past. Incidentally, the measured frequency of quasars in our vicinity is one in a million galaxies. Hence quasar activity may be mainly an outer space phenomenon.
Isn't it nice to know that the power directors and force organizers have these catastrophic collision things under control? And that it's all just part of a routine universal recycling program!
And is it not also nice to know that the running down of our universes is apparent and not real. Science rightly uses what it conceives to be the simplest explanation for known data. It sees an expanding universe and so assumes a beginning calculated by extrapolating backwards from the expansion rate. Rightly, it also assumes the universality of its observed laws of conservation of energy, from which it sees an eventual running down. Continuous creation and controlled energy flow are not measurable--not yet anyhow--and it is good science to stick with the observable.
It was in about 1955 that the New York Times carried a headline report that the size and age of the universe had just doubled. The reason for the report was a new estimate of the
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