Recent content by Astrofan

Yes, all protons have same mass. The details of Main Sequence fusion can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton%E2%80%93proton_chain_reaction#The_pp_I_branch since sticking two protons together into a diproton makes them unhappy (due to electrostatic force), it would want to decay...

FYI, the protons actually don't get so close as for the strong force to overcome the electrostatic force, the fusion process (at least for a main sequence) is mediated by protons tunneling through the electrostatic barriers into the strong interaction potential well (then fuse). A quick...

Just a comment, General Relativity uses "mass-energy" and a source to cause "curvature" in space-time (or if you like it better this way: a source of "gravity") Therefore, yes, photons, as they carrying energy, they will increase the mass-energy of the black hole. (and therefore it's gravity)

But then I don't understand how this conflicts with the interpretation of SGRBs being binary black hole mergers. Could you give your arguments for this suggestion?

Recent studies have actually measured (using various methods) many Supermassive Black Hole spins, but for Quasars, being the most distant objects, have not been measured. To clear up some confusion, As far as general pulsars (that includes millisecond pulsars) are concerned, they actually...

Something related you might would want to check out are "short gamma-ray bursts". Some of them are considered to be merging black holes. Hope that helps.

Hello! I'm currently working on a solenoid and trying to simulate the response of a ferrous rod in the coil. I've been using FEMM 4.2 for my magnetostatic simulations, and Pspice Schematics 9.1 for the circuit part. I was thinking of combining the two by using scripts to let FEMM run through...

Well, finding distances is already a very BIG deal! Knowing how far stuff is happening from us has helped us map out the structure of the universe for instance. Other than that, without knowing the distance from events, the dimensions of objects on the sky are basically physically meaningless...

Lets say you want a black hole to be at the microwave background temperature ~3K that translates to a mass on the order of 10^-23 kg! Even if directly converting that to pure energy (not exactly how Hawking Radiation works) gives you ~5 TeV in total... not very spectacular in terms of bangs...

I think it does. Andormeda and the Milky Way are gravitationally bound, dark energy effects doesn't play a big role at such scales.

Hi there, Here you're mixing stuff, neither Faber-Jackson nor Tully-Fisher has any direct link to SMBH masses. They are as you know, just relations between stellar motion and the luminosity of the whole galaxy. Tully–Fisher relation discusses the "luminosity-stellar rotation velocity"...

Could you give a link to this finding? Seems interesting to get some exact details of why that causes problems with the quark-gluon theory.

I have to admit that there definitely is no 'equation' to them, but on the other hand, they are being handled with a handful of equations. Simulations using MHD, GRMHD, RGRMHD have made lots of progress on the understanding of these jets in general. It is generally thought that AGN jets are the...

I don't really know if this is what you asking, but if what you are talking about is something like the neutrino background of the universe (analogue to the CMB), then neutrinos 'decouple' (getting away from this thermal equilibrium soup) from matter when the universe was still incredibly hot...

It is a close to linear relation on a log-log plot. see plot on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-sigma_relation by the way, the validity of M-sigma relation being applicable to all galaxies is still under debate, there has been recent findings that this relation isn't applicable to...