One of the original things that I've done in terms of reserach, has to do with super massive black holes and how they don't fit into a single reference frame from all points of view. I presented this fact as part of my original SuperScience for High School Physics presentation.
News Release Number: STScI-1995-47
Hubble Finds a New Black Hole - and Unexpected New Mysteries
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Confirming the presence of yet another super-massive black hole in the universe, astronomers using the Hubble telescope have found unexpected mysteries. The black hole and an 800-light-year-wide, spiral-shaped disk of dust fueling it are slightly offset from the center of the host galaxy, NGC 4261.
Prior to Hubble observations, astronomers did not think dust was common in elliptical galaxies like NGC 4261, which were thought to have stopped making stars long ago due to the absence of the requisite raw materials: gas and dust. However, Hubble is showing that dust and dust disks are common in the centers of elliptical galaxies.
Credit: L. Ferrarese (Johns Hopkins University) and NASA
SWWNEWS: What do you mean exactly that a super massive black hole doesn't fit into a single reference frame?
MB: The key is that it doesn't fit into one from all points of view. Supermassive black holes have accretion discs that are hundreds of lights years, and oft times more, across. That means unless you view the black hole straight on from one side or the other, you have no idea what was happening with that object at the same time. In other words, viewing the disc at an angle means that light coming from the disc from portions that are farther away than the other parts of the disc actually happened earlier. So the black hole is in multiple time frames of reference relative to us.
To put it another way, take a clock face, for example. Accepting that it is accurate, we can know with certainty that when we look at that clock face that we can know what time it is. Now let's make it the size of a supermassive black hole and its surrounding material. As long as we are looking directly at the clock face, the same as we would if it was small and on the wall, we can still know what time it is. But, if we tilt that clock, that same certainty of accuracy goes out the window because if the clock says 12, and it is titled away from us - the light coming from the clock when the hands are at 12 is not reaching us at the same time as the light from that the portion of the clock where the 6 is, because it is farther away. So although we may know generally how far away the clock is, the clock is not entirely in a single frame of reference from our view point. And to think about it, in this case, we would actually be tipped off to this fact because we would see multiple sets of minute and hour hands, each set indicating a different time. That's the first time I used a clock as an example, so that's why it just hit me like that. Normally we don't see obvious demarcations like that with black holes, we have to look for eruptions or other events that would indicate potential differences in the overall body of the black hole area.
SWWNEWS: What kind of eruption?
News Release Number: STScI-1998-22
Hubble Uncovers Dust Disk around a Massive Black Hole
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Resembling a gigantic hubcap in space, a 3,700-light-year-wide dust disk encircles a 300-million- solar-mass black hole in the center of the elliptical galaxy NGC 7052.
The disk, possibly a remnant of an ancient galaxy collision, will be swallowed up by the black hole in several billion years. The black-and-white image on the left, taken by a ground-based telescope, shows the complete galaxy. The Hubble picture on the right is a close-up view of the dust disk surrounding the black hole.
Credit: Roeland P. van der Marel (STScI), Frank C. van den Bosch (Univ. of Washington), and NASA.
MB: Well, for example the X-ray jet eruptions in 1998 captured by the Chandra X-ray telescope. Now according to the Chandra X-ray Observatory, first one jet appeared and then an opposite one, and there were some questions as to why the first one seemed to travel farther away from the black hole than the other. The final determination was that this first one, the eastern oriented jet, was titled toward Earth whereas the opposite was true for the other. Now this black hole in question was not a supermassive one and all of this was observed over a 4 year period. What is interesting is that the jet toward Earth was spotted first. Depending on the size of this black hole, which is never really given, and its orientation in regards to Earth, which is also left ambiguous, it is very possible that the first jet seen was the second jet emitted and not the other way around. We would observe the Earth tilted jet first because it is tilted toward Earth and its light would have less distance to travel. The opposite jet would have had a farther distance. So theoretically, we have a loss of causality or at least the order of events. We don't know which event took place first, only which one we saw first. On a supermassive black hole scale, there's no question. Once you talk about things being tilted toward Earth and what not, all bets are off. Anything tilted toward Earth would have taken place after those events tilted away. On the supermassive black hole scale, guaranteed observations of simultaneity from all reference points is impossible.
SWWNEWS: And you discovered this?
MB: I figured this out around 2002/2003. I was doing research for my 4th d hypothesis theory and I knew I had to find evidence for it in nature, just like they did for special and general relativity and all of the others. The 4th d hypothesis is a spacetime theory that applies to all scales, ranging from the quantum to the cosmological. It reinforces relativity, quantum mechanics, as well as the Everett/Wheeler hypothesis and it nails down the description of the universe.
SWWNEWS: Really? In what way?
MB: For example, scientists will say that they're seeing a black hole do this today like it's happening rigtht now, when in reality it happened years, decades or centuries ago. We don't even know if that black hole is even still there, sometimes. Looking out into space at great distances we are simply looking back in time. Once you apply that spatial temporal relationship to objects such as supermassive black holes, which themselves take up large areas of cosmological real estate, you realize that they can actually exist in multiple slices of time when viewed from certain perspectives, making it impossible to know what that black hole was doing as a whole from that view point.
It's what brought me to my current focus on the nature of time. Time as applied to velocity, gravity, psychology, time travel, quantum mechanics, cosmology, and even philosophy. Time is one of the big unsolved questions and I mean to solve it.
